well i could not wait any longer.. i need something to shoot at with all this spared time. i bought it on Steam and started the game this morning. will update my review in the coming days. quick question - i noticed my GPU ( 1070 Gaming X ) is almost reaching 80 degrees after 10-15 mins in the game, i play with VSYNC on. not that i worry, but i never seen this temp on my card not even in a synthetic benchmark. the highest iv seen was around 72 degrees, case is always clean and very well ventilated. could it be DX11 ? i didn't try DX12 or Vulkan just yet.
I still cant bring myself to get the game. Even watching some SE Cathedral epicness and Mental institution levels to bring up that nostalgia, eh. Making me sad i grow up on with these games... Didnt even know SS2 last level was remade in SS3. Wow... Spoiler
I initially thought it was the case but the game spawns shader compiler threads and runs the compilation at the end of loading screens, you can see it clearly if you open console during loading. Unless there is some catch where shader compiler doesn't cover stuff being loaded at runtime (which would be pretty bad design but happens in some games) this shouldn't be the case.
Played for a little over 2 hours (so no refund ) Let's get this out the way first: performance is indeed a bit hit and miss. However after tweaking settings and trying different APIs I'm now running Vulkan (best performance for me clearly) with a mix of High and Ultra preset settings + a few manual tweaks. I'm using ingame fps cap of 120, which the game sticks to somewhat. In heavy action fps seemed to drop to 80 ... 90 but that's still a solid framerate. Running at 1920x1080. As for the rest that's been said is wrong with the game... tbh I don't get it. So far at least. Gunplay : great as ever Graphics: not groundbreaking but given the game perfectly good. A definite improvement over BFE. Texture resolution in places very sharp (maxed out)! AI: works. Come on this is SS. Level design: imo much better than ever before, devs have found a way to have a little bit of variation in the arena - tunnel scheme. NPCs: honestly who cares about that Cutscenes: same as above (plus just skip them) Story: same as above (although it seems Sam has been given a bit of personality which to me is a plus but guess for some a cardinal crime) Bugs: don't think I saw one Crashes: nope Honesty if you like previous Sam games just get this. Also hotfix 1.01 already out so likely fixed some issues already.
1070GTX\6700K\16GB on a 60Hz\1080P monitor. 5 and half hours in it. it is most definitely a letdown for me when i compare it to the First and Second encounter games. i am playing on DX12 and the performance is stable - just went with optimal settings and vsync-on as always. my GPU temp is almost 80 in this game, i never had it in any other game tbh. so.. a short mid game review : game-play\gun-play : decent, feels good. graphics: ok, with some strange animations. levels\environments: biggest letdown for me. no where near the first game that i adored. story: it's.. a mistake. im skipping every stupid cut-scene. the humor is meh, voice acting is amateur, and it's simply uninteresting and silly. bugs: i had one crash at the end of chapter one. i am disappointed in general because my expectations from this one were higher. it feels like Serious Sam with lazy\dull environments, story and characters that should not have been existed, the biggest flaw in my eyes is the environments. so far i didn't like any of it and this is one of the best things the First Encounter brought. i don't regret buying it, i am gonna finish it as fast as i can. 6\10 at best. if il change my mind ( didn't finish it.. ) il update my review.
About 7 hours in... and, I'm absolutely loving it. Yes, lets get it out of the way, the game is a bit rough around the edges. It definitely needs some love and I'm sure with some updates, will be amazing. There is no doubt in my mind that Croteam will work hard as ever to polish it up. How it got released with some performance hiccups... who knows. It's easy to sit back from the outside and point fingers and throw blame at deves and publishers, but we don't know what was happening behind closed doors. But, given Croteam's history... no worries. They continued patches/support for Sam 3 up until it's inclusion into Serious Sam Fusion. I hope Sam 4 is rolled into Fusion in the future, but... IIRC, that would require a pretty sizeable rewrite to a lot of Fusion's engine code. BUT... as for the game, I'm running 1080p on Vulkan. A mix of High/Ultra/Medium settings... and mostly a rock solid 60fps. A few very quick dips in large fights, mostly large fights with big explosions. But it's mostly very stable and smooth. I've had no crashes, hangs, hiccups or problems. None of the visual issues or graphical problems people keep crying about and showing in "review" videos. Specially nothing like what Gmanlives' shows in his review. Story... well, it's Serious Sam, so it's campy, stupid and odd. But, that's always been the case. There's still less story in this then there was in Serious Sam 2... But, I don't hate it. Sam as always is great, and I love that his new design seems like a mix of Sam 3 and Sam 2's designs. Level design is great, it feels familiar yet more polished. They stepped up the "corridor/big square room" design to make it feel more natural. And, glad they stepped away from Egypt, enjoying the more diverse settings. Enemies of course are always a highlight, tons of great designs. Insane how many different aliens there are in this. Combat is great. Serious Sam through and through, love the classic weapons redesign and expanded abilities, and the new gadgets are great additions to the game. It's not a perfect game, and it does need a bit of attention to really reach it's "golden" spot. But, for fans of Serious Sam, I feel it delivers on everything it set out to. It's not reinventing the genre, but that was never the intention.
I am in the third level now, game patched to 1.01 and gameplay wise it is still good, I like it. I started with Vulkan but it kept crashing after the 1st chapter so I switched to DX11 with High/Ultra mix, 2560x1440, FPS capped to 120 and so far so good - framerate fluctuates between 85-120, expected much worse after the YT reviews. Will see in later levels. Also will test this more with updated drivers (still using NV 451.48). As for the looks their engine is really starting to be outdated now. I don't mind older games - in fact I play them most of the time, but this I would call SS 3.1, not 4 - don't see much of an evolution here. We have the traditionally ugly characters in cutscenes, blocky/flickering shadows, weird looking static backdrops, performance drops here and there and so on. At least the monsters look great. I think they also went for better quality textures now, which is causing longer loading times and stuttering at level startup, but this thankfully stabilizes itself quickly. Lets hope they will polish it in the future patches, but it really is NOT as bad as some reviewers described it.
finished it. lowered the difficulty to Easy since i wanted to rush the game. had another few crashes in some cut-scenes, it's not an issue for me because i reloaded a save game and quickly skipped them. but* Croteam needs to take care of it because releasing the game that way isn't the right way to go. that's not random crashes, it happened in a few specific cut-scenes and saw more reports on these issues via Steam. this game was as mediocre as it can be, not even close to the first two games. it lacks the magic, the unique environments. i had some performance issues in the last chapters and in the final boss fight. i did like some of the music in some levels, reminded me of Doom on some parts. im not recommending this unless you have spared time, and you buy it on sale. that's just my opinion on it. gonna keep going with my Witcher III map hunt. have a good one.
It's not so much an engine limitation... it's that Croteam simply are not good at modeling/animating humans. They do great with the enemies/monsters. Those are beautifully detailed and modeled, but... humans/NPCs... look stiff, odd and clunky. They look better then they did in Sam3, but, you can really see it's not Croteam's strong suit.
Tried running the game with Vulkan and capped the FPS to 60, overall it seems to be "closest to optimal" experience although drops in hordes still occur and resource usage is all over the place. Only issue is that going from the ingame menus (netricsa) back to game has quite a fair chance to crash the game. Outside performance and stability my only gripes with the game is the overall art direction in regards to lighting and reflections. It's very hard to find color settings preset which looks just right in terms of brightness/contrast and color saturation but once you get one level looking decent, next one will usually be overly bright or dark. Other than that i'm baffled by absolute lack of screen space reflections, in an era where they're slowly phased out by raytraced reflections, SS4 still sticks to cubemaps and planar reflections (which don't even seem to be used on bodies of water, only usage of those i noticed in Netricsa screen where character models are mirrored on the "ground") Some areas really do suffer from poor quality and outright wrong reflections, mostly ones with big bodies of water.
Imo the character models look as expected for SS and definitely a LOT better than BFE. As do graphics in general. Yeah the reflections are low res cubemaps and could be improved but it is what it is. Shadow maps start looking notably better on Ultra or Maximum but I found it also hurts performance a fair bit. Furthermore the "side quests" are basically optional routes or encounters that reward you with stuff, not some arbitrary filler I was afraid they'd be. At least so far. The perks give you extra abilities and the tree is simple enough, this was another thing that worried me. I laughed out loud when Sam finds the first artifact and breaks it (obvious nod to Doom 2016). You inhaled it didn't you Almost forgot: I think you can get better framerate consistency by manually tweaking particle density, grass density and debris. High and Ultra presets set these pretty high so drop them a few notches.
Well that's some good input from people. I'll definitely be waiting for a sale and some more polish, still got plenty of other stuff to play until CyberPunk.
Since I updated to the latest NV drivers (456.55), Vulkan stopped crashing. I have better framerates with Vulkan and less graphical glitches than in DX12 I tested before. DX11 was OK but slower. I ended up capping the game to 100FPS for less framerate fluctuations and GPU roasting. I wish that Croteam spent more time with optimizations, the GPU hammering just doesn't correspond with things happening on screen. Like for example - Sam is standing between orthogonal walls, there is no dynamic light, no reflections, no enemies, nothing is even moving, yet the framerate barely reaches 100FPS depending of what is he starring at. C'mon... what is that engine doing, mining bitcoins? Anyway, completed the game and it was a good ride. Nothing spectacular, but shooting is fun as in other SS games. Some levels actually looked nice, like the one with lava or the castle. The last boss was meh, don't know why people demand more of the "legion system", to me it is just a chaotic mess.
Good to hear, gonna give the new driver a spin then. Still using 451.85. Though I haven't had but one crash and that was after tweaking multiple settings ingame, including MSAA, and opening and closing Netricsa several times. Might be placebo but disabling CFG for Sam4.exe in Exploit Protection seems to have lessened stutters more (Vulkan).
They are good at modeling the monsters, but not good at modeling the humans? And the fact is that to model a human is easier. You should rethink this.
That's actually not entirely true in practice. From laymans perspective it is an assumption that it's easy to model humans because humans, unlike monsters do exist - you know how humans look, you know how they work. But that just makes it harder to replicate them in 2d/3d because everyone is a critic. There is genuine issue of trying to replicate living things called uncanny valley that describes a curve where anything prior to peaking point is considered unrealistic and anything past that point is considered too real and offputting and striking the middle point is incredibly hard. Whilst with monsters and overall unreal design there are no rules or existing preconceptions on how those look/work in real life so as long as animation is semi decent and polycount/texture resolution are roughly sufficient it's just acceptable. This isn't only symptomatic to Croteam, FWH's Shadow Warrior 1&2 had same exact issue where human characters looked significantly worse than monsters.
Completed the game. Leaving issues aside, i would say it's an overall great game and a definite improvement over SS3. Surely not as great as one would hope to compensate for 9 years of absence but still competent on its own. After it's all patched up and overall (currently very uneven) quality level of all aspects gets equalized i would say it's best SS game to date. I just couldn't help but chuckle at the fact the game crashed on me at the very end of the ending credits, i guess no harm done at that point.
