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Devolver Digital lifted the lid on a new Serious Sam game during today’s Xbox showcase, and it’s a little bit different from the ones that have come before. Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a run-based multiplayer FPS for up to five players, each of them a Sam from a different dimension, who travel through a multiverse torn to pieces by the villainous Mental and try to put things right.
Serious Sam games have a fairly distinct style: Huge, open battlefields, massive waves of enemies, and a large arsenal of weapons (many of them not particularly practical) with which to dispatch them. They support various co-op and versus multiplayer modes, which are fun if not especially memorable, but singleplayer is the real name of the game—even though the campaigns are really just paper-thin excuses to blast the bejeezus out of everything.
Superficially, Shatterverse follows the pattern, with an “irresponsible arsenal” of old and new weapons and gadgets, and huge amounts of guys rushing straight at you, eager to be turned into goo. (There’s also a lot of old Egypt in it, because that’s what the first game did and they’ve just stuck with it ever since.)
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The difference is that rather than playing through a conventional campaign, Shatterverse takes players through “procedurally shifted runs across hand-crafted arenas set in previously unexplored worlds,” with “unstable anomalies, hidden portals and high-risk opportunities that can supercharge a run—or end it instantly.” The further you go, the better the rewards and modifiers, and you’ll also earn permanent character upgrades as you progress.
When I first ran across Serious Sam: Shatterverse, my mind flashed immediately to the new Painkiller that dropped last year, a “reimagining” of the classic People Can Fly shooter that turned it into a run-based multiplayer shooter that was really not great.
Upon further consideration, though, I’m inclined to give Shatterverse a bit more grace. The wide-open Serious Sam style is more conducive to multiplayer action, for one thing, and the series has always happily embraced the absurd, which makes this sort of take on it more palatable. Making every player a different variant of Sam is a clever twist too, and even though most of the voices in the trailer are unfamiliar, I was happy to confirm that original Serious Sam voice actor John J. Dick is back for this one too.
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Another interesting note is that Serious Sam: Shatterverse is not being developed by Croteam, which I guess is awash in Talos Principle money now, but by Behaviour Interactive, best known for the multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight. Behaviour producer Nic Duchesne said the studio’s main goal “was to respect Serious Sam’s rich legacy while presenting it in a fresh, contemporary way unlike anything seen before in the series.”
Croteam had equally nice things to say about it: “It’s very exciting to see another talented team step in and create something bold, fresh and different within the universe we cherished for so long,” studio co-founder Davor Hunski said.
A release date for Serious Sam: Shatterverse wasn’t announced but it’s expected to be out later this year, and it’s up for wishlisting now on Steam. If you want some seriously good old-time shooter action while you wait, pretty much the entire franchise is deeply discounted in the Steam Spring Sale.
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