Serious Sam: Shatterverse... is the 3rd roguelike spinoff of Serious Sam following I Hate Running Backwards and Serious Sam: Tormental. It is a very flawed game by many metrics that I'm sure you will find by combing through reviews. Various bugs, a weird game balance, dialogue and humor that at best varies in quality... and yet... this game speaks to me.
When I played the playtest, I more or less knew what I was getting into. I am no stranger to Serious Sam or roguelikes. I am especially no stranger to spinoffs of Serious Sam and how they like to deviate away from what the mainline games like to do. But I asked for one thing from Shatterverse: regardless of how weird or how much you deviate, you're essentially a roguelike boomer shooter, so be a fun one.
The gameplay is like a mix of Serious Sam and Gunfire Reborn. A strange hybrid of the two formulas that, while imperfect, scratched an itch I'd been having for a few months now. You can carry all the weapon types at once if you wish, and weapons will reload when they aren't currently equipped. Beyond the magazine, ammo is no issue and is infinite. Your big things to manage (beyond the obviously loot & roguelike tropes) will be health and armor, health being primarily replenished by essentially glory killing enemies, armor being a bit more scarce. Sometimes you'll get to choose "Restore all Health" or "restore all armor" as upgrades, and this may seem useless or boring, but if timed and utilized correctly it can save or break a run. It's like the game has a bunch of weird little quirks and things just work weird compared to other games in the genre, and while I think there's room for improvement, I actually kinda like them. As for co-op mode, I haven't played it too much but I didn't have any issues when I did play it. I mainly run this game solo.
Everything beyond the gameplay is where I think the game doesn't perform nearly as well. I don't think it's irredeemably awful, but I'm not gonna tell you it has the same level of oomph I feel from the gameplay. Story? You can write it off pretty much. It feels like it's just there for flavor text if anything. The dialogue sometimes delivers some good interaction between the characters and good jokes, but also often times falls flat because either the jokes are not actually funny or the dialogue isn't interesting. Personality-wise, my favorite characters are Alien Sam and Broken Sam.
For the more rough side of the gameplay and whatnot: The upgrades you get from levelling up do give you small bonuses. You can upgrade them to make them better with the permanent currency you earn while playing. Despite this you can still kindof synergize things and make good builds, it's just weird how it works and I don't fully understand it yet. And the bosses are mostly fun too, but could also use some adjustments to some of their attacks as they're either a little too strong or not telegraphed too well. Jumping between acts (basically this game's version of difficulty settings) does sometimes feel like a bit too much of a difficulty curve at times too (I heard the highest one is the worst jump but I haven't played it yet). Also, there could be more level variety. Like 90% of my runs, the first biome I get is the snow biome with nearly identical layouts, which also led to me hearing the exact same conversation between characters like 10 times in a row for a while.
If you were expecting something on the level of mainline Sam games, you will be disappointed. If you were expecting this to play with the exact same balance as Serious Sam or other roguelike shooters, you will be disappointed. I don't know how to explain this game's balance, but it is there. There is something to work with here and it's quite interesting to toy with, but it feels different from the other roguelikes I've played which is why I can't describe it. All I know is I've been itching for a good roguelike boomer shooter for months, something that isn't STRAFE, Bloodshed, or Nightmare Reaper (all great games, just not the formula I'm itching for rn), and this scratches that itch better than I understand. You, of course, probably won't like this game as much as I do even if you have a good time with it.
I'm not expecting a lot of updates to this if any, but I'd definitely like to see the major issues others are having get fixed as well, considering others have reported crashes and shoddy netcode. I haven't encountered these issues myself, but that doesn't mean patches aren't in order.
