Oh my God. This game is terrible. Like, seriously. Stay the fuck away from this.
It feels like an early access game made with off-the-shelf assets.
I played three hours and I was happy to stop and uninstall.
That is so disappointing to hear. In terms of feel, have the environments taken a step back from the samey levels from the previous games or is it more that the moment-to-moment combat this time round plain sucks?
After all the praise that the Talos Principle received, I was anticipating this to be something special. :(
The environments are very cut & paste and in some places, don’t even look like they’re finished. I saw multiple areas where it looked like they had stopped rendering the lighting in the level and just shrugged and moved on. Plus, it’s very generic looking. I wasn’t kidding about the way it looks like they got a bunch of stuff from an asset shop.
The actual shooting is okay, but the level design in places limits your movement, hamstringing the familiar Serious Sam running backwards stuff. Plus, you start the game without the ability to reload while sprinting! You have to unlock it using the skill system, so until you do that, you’re a slow stumbling jackass.
Finally, a game protagonist I can identify with! ;-)
Why the hell does every game company think their FPS title needs leveling up and unlocking systems these days? Nine times out of ten it feels stupid and ham fisted.
I was watching a streamer I like play this over the weekend and he seemed like he was having a blast. Of course, one of the reasons I like the streamer is because he always seems like he’s having a blast, so that may not say much about the game. But, not really being familiar with the franchise, I am kinda tempted to give this a shot.
game suddenly becomes much better once you’re out of the first two chapters (out of Rome and into Pompeii) - almost like those two areas were made by different developers. i was getting bad SS3 flashbacks then, but now it (so far) seems like an actual proper follow-up to TFE/TSE. it’s highly recommend to play on at least Hard difficulty, if not Serious.
but it does kinda feel like Italy was chosen as the initial starting location so Croteam would have an opportunity to quickly reuse a bunch of their art asset work for Talos Principle (finger-wagging emoji).
Nearly thirty years ago, a group of childhood friends got together to start Croteam from a small garage in Zagreb. The fledgeling studio was built around creative experimentation, pushing technical boundaries, and a trust in one another that would span decades. The team dabbled in soccer / football games before putting together a dazzling tech demo that would eventually become Serious Sam and change the path of the studio forever. But it was a struggle to sign the Serious Sam demo with a publisher and only one label - Gathering of Developers - showed interest and support. That support blossomed into friendship and respect which would eventually reconnect Croteam with some of the Gathering of Developers team when they later helped found Devolver Digital.
A decade ago Devolver Digital was just getting started and looking for its first project to partner on in the emerging digital distribution world. Similarly, Croteam was on the search for a partner it could trust to help them bring their beloved franchise back to prominence with the upcoming Serious Sam 3. And like that, the next big Serious Sam game brought old partners back together and forged a decade of friendship and dedication.
Since then Croteam and Devolver Digital have partnered on dozens of games - from the frantic Serious Sam series to the award-winning The Talos Principle across PC, consoles, VR and mobile platforms. Croteam and Devolver Digital have been dating for so long that we decided to go ahead and just get married .
Devolver has acquired Croteam…or maybe Croteam has acquired Devolver…who could really know at this point in the relationship. What’s certain is that our future together is ultra exciting with new projects like The Talos Principle 2, more Serious Sam games, and original IP from Croteam and the Croteam Incubator studios. Croteam will of course keep total creative freedom and Devolver Digital gets to keep making dumb recommendations that Croteam just ignores - we prefer it that way.
So this is on sale. It looks like it’s gotten a lot better since launch. Anyone care to chime in?
They changed the name, so I’m still not interested. If it was still called Planet Badass, I would have bought it already.
…what?
i’m back into it. the dialog is, almost without exception, truly tired and derivative and i don’t pay much attention to it. (tho some of Sam’s one-liners are funny, in the usual way…) i’m not even sure what the plot is anymore. gameplay itself is ok. it’s not FE/SE levels of greatness, but i think it’s significantly improved over SS3.
I guess if there’s a new one coming out soon, I should try out Planet Badass.
Update:
I installed it through Game Pass for PC, and played through the opening losing scenario. It turns out Planet Badass is the Earth! I wasn’t expecting that.
Then the game resets to “92 hours earlier”. I hope that doesn’t mean the campaign is 92 hours long.
Standalone expansion made by Timelock, a modding team.
Full marks for syncing the action to the music!
So two or so years after I posted that I was thinking about trying this out, I’m trying this out! Why not, it’s on Game Pass and I felt like checking something out of the ordinary. I’m not sure how I feel about the shooting, but then again I’m playing on console and this was probably designed around PC. But I do like the cast of characters and all the bizarre enemies I’m running into. Aliens and commandos and vampires, oh my!
I realize interest in this game is very, well, light but I’m going to put a few more impressions from a few hours of playtime. I’ve gotten through a few levels and think I have a handle on how the game works.
First of all, the levels are very strange. They’re very wide open, which I know dovetails with the way the game loves to throw massive waves of enemies at you from many directions at once. But those arena areas are joined by strange maze-like corridors, many of which are behind locked fences. And what’s strange about that is that sometimes you’ll find a key, and can unlock the gate and explore the area behind it. But more often, you can’t, or at least I can’t. And there’s this sense that I may be missing huge sections of the level. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but it feels that way and leaves me feeling kind of unsatisfied.
And secondly the combat is odd too. I mentioned those waves of enemies, but they’re not terribly interesting and don’t really have much in the way of tactics. They’re either getting in your face and punching you and blowing up, or they’re hanging back and plinking at you. And sometimes waves will have both kinds, and you’ve got to manage how to deal with the close quarters guys will the guys in the back are shooting at you. But it’s not really very tactically interesting, the plinkers don’t move too much while the close quarters guys rarely stand still. And there’s these annoying floating UFO things that are kind of hard to shoot out of the sky. I get the feeling Serious Sam throws these large groups of enemies at you to kind of mask this lack of tactics, but maybe I’m being unfair. It’s kind of fun in its own way, and I do like the weapons and tools available for use. We’ll see how things go.