‘Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass’ Just Jumped the Queue of E3 Announcements

Jeremy Ray
Games Game Trailers
Games Game Trailers PC Gaming

Getting well ahead of the E3 news rush, Croteam has announced Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass ahead of E3. It will definitely be available on PC, though we don’t know about consoles yet. We should hear more at E3.

Not much is shown in the trailer, but the classic Serious Sam enemy of a beheaded, shirtless lunatic sprinting towards you with two bombs features prominently. How is he even yelling?

Fans of the old games will fondly remember that moment after one of those enemies is killed, and then a horde of them come running over a hill. It’s a moment faithfully recreated in this trailer. Now with added grass that sways in the breeze!

It’s a sequel in an old-school, silly franchise in an era of old-school, silly FPS franchises trying to grow up and show maturity in their sequels.

We do have to wonder if Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass will undergo a similar change.

Wolfenstein is still very silly but no one could accuse it of being stale and unchanging. It’s upped its storytelling game massively, and included a bunch of bonkers weapons to play with.

Doom also innovated. It was very much a Doom game, but a few smart additions like the melee insta-kills that keep you going in the fight were welcome improvements.

Will Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass similarly level up? Or is there a place in 2018 for games that unashamedly stick to their roots?

To be clear, we’re not talking about Sam himself becoming some grizzled, newly sensitive protagonist with a redemption story arc. Not every game needs to be Logan or God of War.

But at their core, Serious Sam games were largely shoot & strafe. They were born of a time when the first-person perspective was so new, shoot & strafe was exciting enough on its own. On a mechanical and gameplay level, Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass is just going to have to do more to keep modern FPSers interested.

You’ve got your FPS games targeting the retro market, to be sure. We recently covered Dusk, which is all about those old-school FPS feels. It does a great job of it. But that works as an indie game with a niche market. If you’re targeting a larger audience (and a larger budget), you’re going to need more.

Jeremy Ray
Decade-long games critic and esports aficionado. Started in competitive Counter-Strike, then moved into broadcast, online, print and interpretative pantomime. You merely adopted the lag. I was born in it.