My favourite Serious Sam title to date is the PlayStation 2/GameCube spinoff, Next Encounter. As much as I enjoy Croteam’s work with the series proper, Climax Solent’s take on the formula had a better rhythm and energy to the action. Or it might have just been that it was my first Serious Sam, so I immediately latched on to it as the “canon” for the series in my brain. Anyhow, there’s something to Serious Sam: Shatterverse that reminds me a little of Next Encounter at times, in its pure focus on throwing hordes of enemies at you, even compared to the mainline Serious Sam titles.
The roguelike framework does seem like it would suit this approach to Serious Sam’s action on the surface, which is a series that has always been about gunning down big hordes of enemies and listening to satirically stupid quips that it can throw in during the action rather than having to deliver a narrative. The roguelike facilitates this, as it is structured around having you wander from one randomly generated big arena after another and shoot at swarms of enemies (most of them favourites from the previous Serious Sam titles) before they finally become overwhelming, and then you get to do it again. You’ll unlock different versions of “Sam,” each of which will have a different “personality” with the quips, and you’ll slowly gain the resources and, particularly, weapons to make the Sams more powerful, allowing you to venture deeper before the hordes become overwhelming.
The game controls nicely. Your Sam moves fast, and at its best you’re able to wield your weapons with the twitch-like speed that you need to deal with the bedlam erupting around you. What is unfortunate, however, is that the game is far too infrequently at its best. The first half dozen hours are a real grind where the hordes of enemies are more mundane than chaotic in scope, and the upgrades are painfully generic. Things do get better later, once you’ve got some unlocks going and reaching the bigger hordes of enemies. There’s not necessarily a great variety of those, but the numbers more than make up for it.
But the randomness of this does let Shatterverse down as well. I know Serious Sam seems like a series where the developers had fun just spamming the “CTRL+V” keys to drop enemies onto the maps, but in actual practice a lot of design work went into them to make sure that the hordes came on with the right mix, at the right pacing, and with the right difficulty curve. By leaving enemy patterns down to chance, Shatterverse ends up lacking variety and feeling aimless. One horde isn’t memorably, entertainingly different to the last. It’s just another horde to grind your way through, until one is so overpowered that you may as well just put the controller down at the futility of it.
All of this remains true in the multiplayer, too. That is the better gameplay mode, simply because this is a silly action game with a lot of action. To a certain extent, I was actually reminded of Gauntlet Legends, back on the N64, as a similar example of a highly repetitive, multiplayer-first action game where, individually, the action is very simple and even limited, but in a group you can all have a good laugh. There’s no room for tactics or strategy in this multiplayer mode (just like with Gauntlet), but I’m also bringing up a game from almost thirty years ago (God, I’m getting old) for a reason; there’s a place for utterly mindless multiplayer action games that you can play deep into the beers on a Friday night, and with games having so many rule sets and unlocks and decision trees and features, we don’t really see that many of them these days.
Then again, the reviews that I think this game is headed towards will probably explain why we don’t get many of these kinds of multiplayer experiences now. To be clear, Shatterverse is a massively limited game and surprisingly sterile for Serious Sam. I will say it does a better job of being true to Serious Sam than that travesty of a Painkiller that was released last year. And it is genuinely entertaining if you specifically don’t go looking for depth.
Personally, when I look at Serious Sam: Shatterverse as a piece of pure entertainment, the only thing that really let me down is that it just doesn’t have the frequency of true bedlam moments that I like in my Serious Sam titles. I thought, going in, that the roguelike structure would suit this kind of game, but as it turns out, the need to build a repetitive grind into a game, even one where the entire point is to point-and-shoot at things, lets the overall experience down. It’s almost like the roguelike is more limited as a “genre” than the number of roguelikes that get released each year would suggest. But on the other hand, there’s an asterisk to that disappointment; after enough beers, the grind isn’t as noticeable, and I can actually see myself coming back to Shatterverse fairly frequently. It might be something with a very narrow set of circumstances that put me in the mood for it, but it’s good to have one option in the library for when you and some mates need something truly mindless to unwind with.
