Serious Sam: Tormental is an ugly, fun mess – Hands-on impressions

gamepur.com:

In my previous venture into the Serious Sam realm, I stated that boomer-shooters are the “balm of the soul.” It’s something I still stand by —if you’re having a cruddy day, you can load up a Doom or a Quake, shoot some demons, and I guarantee you’ll feel at least slightly better. I can’t say that I felt that much better after spending time with Serious Sam: Tormental. I didn’t hate it — I just wish there was a little more available in visuals and gameplay than what is offered.

Tormental differs from the main franchise, instead of a first-person shooter, you are instead playing a top-down roguelite. Excursions from the tried-and-true Serious Sam formula are nothing new — in 2011, Croteam partnered with indie developer Vlambeer to create Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (a turn-based RPG) as an example. While the game received mixed reviews, allowing a studio to take your franchise and spin it out of the FPS genre is unique. I will always applaud studios that take chances — even if those chances don’t always pan out.

The most immediate thing I noticed in Tormental is how boring the game looks. Low-res polygonal models reminiscent of Roblox for gameplay and flat 2D MSPaint-style character art don’t do this game any favors. Art is subjective, of course, but the models made processing information and feedback very difficult — shots fired and explosions are often hard to parse out from the backgrounds, especially when a deluge of enemies fill the screen. This is especially apparent with the second boss, Brainstorm, which constantly revives entities throughout the fight. As for the character art, it’s just…boring. Boring to look at, boring to think about — it reminds me heavily of clip art.

The soundtrack is up next on things