Serious Sam: Shatterverse - Dimensional Disappointment (Review)
Serious Sam: Shatterverse
Released: August 31st, 2026
Developer: Behavior Interactive
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series
I like what story there is to the Serious Sam series. Though entirely famous for their manic FPS combat, the games pack surprising amounts of lore under a simple surface, complete with weird alien races and planetary history. A new spin-off about alternate realities with their own Sam Stones had my attention - it's not the most original pitch in and of itself, but fun new ways of exploring a familiar world is a mine that never quite runs dry. I wasn't put off by the proposed cooperative focus either, even if its release did clash with Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2.
In hindsight, there was no fear on that last part. This game isn't going to get in the way of anything else a person could be doing.
Underneath its veneer, Serious Sam: Shatterverse is an almost serviceable series entry, fulfilling rudimentary expectations by throwing loads and loads of enemies into your relentless gunfire. What hurts this particular installment is an immense volume of missed potential - Shatterverse pitches itself as a roguelite twist on the Serious Sam formula, but “roguelite” should be couched in the biggest quote marks possible. None of what’s meant to make this game unique is present to any meaningful degree, but the core gameplay’s had to make room for it regardless.
Everything about the basic premise is wasted. You don’t explore diverse new versions of Serious Sam’s universe, you just visit familiar locations hosting a familiar roster of alien enemies. The alternate Sams are equally disappointing - they’re blatantly inspired by the Spider-verse films, but the comparison is purely surface level. You have the polygonal Retro Sam, irritating Cartoon Sam, sad old Broken Sam, requisite girl Orphan Sam, and a Reptiloid imaginatively named Alien Sam. They get little characterization beyond stock traits and they’re mechanically interchangeable except for one unique ability apiece.
That is as far as Shatterverse’s allegedly shattered universe is explored. It’s so flimsy that I can’t see it as anything more than an excuse to justify a co-op focus. A good concept’s just tossed in the bin.
Same goes for the “Roguelite” elements, which are some of the most desperately weak I’ve ever seen. Yes, guns appear as loot drops, and yes, you get XP with perk rewards, but there’s no depth to be found anywhere. Most perks are incremental passives that do little to shake up the experience, so don’t expect to make a specialized “build” or anything. With Serious Sam’s gameplay, you don’t really want to specialize in the first place - just select whatever deals the most damage with the highest rate of fire, and make do with whatever perks you get along the way.
A run consists of nine stages, shuffled from a fairly humble pool. Levels are static, meaning you’ll see the same layout with the same enemy encounters every time you visit one. Whatever randomization occurs within a map escapes perception, and while higher difficulties add more unpredictable enemy spawns, by you’ll have run through the same old shit too many times to care by then.
Weapons are slightly more interesting since they sometimes drop with elemental effects or other unique traits, but the most remarkable thing is how rarely you pick up anything better than what you have. For as many guns that drop on harder modes, most of them will be pure trash, including any given as rewards for optional combat encounters. Even at it’s most exciting, any given gun fires exactly the same as another of its type. No matter the rarity, a pistol is a pistol, a shotgun is a shotgun, and they’ll never feel special in any way.
As noted, each Sam is mechanically identical except for their one Ultimate ability - a misleading name, as it implies there are other abilities. Not every Ultimate is created equally, with Orphan standing so far out as the superior choice that it’s ridiculous. She summons a lingering sphere of damage that can suck enemies into it with a shocking range after just one upgrade. In comparison, Retro Sam squirts out decoys, Cartoon Sam has a one-shot explosion, Broken Sam gets a brief laser beam, and Alien Sam temporarily fires four shotguns at once. Not a single one of them is as satisfying, effective, or amusingly broken as Orphan’s screen clearer.
Gun types are equally uneven in terms of usefulness. With up to five players shooting at the same horde (“up to” being the operative part), anything that has a slow rate of fire can’t kill very much at all - a spell book that requires charging is a joke when you have a minigun. Guns automatically reload while unequipped so you’re incentivized to keep swapping out, but that means either manually cycling through your whole arsenal or constantly fiddling with a weapon wheel. Depending on what weapons you have foisted upon you, you may find it easier to just eat the manual reload time.
New weapons can be permanently unlocked to appear as new loot drops, but unlocking anything good necessitates spending currency on some real garbage first, which will only increase the inventory clutter as one progresses. You’ll inevitably pick up unwanted guns throughout a run and they’ll feel like a waste of space unless you drop them or get a chance to sell them. Not that you often have anything good to spend the gold on - shop guns are as pathetic as loot drops.
When you start the game, you may see a campaign made up of three acts and assume you’re getting a campaign made up of three acts. More accurately, it’s one act made up of one act presented as three acts, which of course makes much more sense! Each “act” is pretty much a glorified difficulty level, adding additional hurdles but otherwise repeating the same stages, bosses, and barely existent narrative. You have to access all three “acts” sequentially, as if you’re advancing a campaign rather than treading more water in this damp, damp game. Nonsense.
There is no campaign. There’s no forward momentum, no goal to reach for, it’s just repeating runs across what only amounts to a few maps and five bosses. The only real progression consists of unlocking characters that don’t matter, buying guns to the detriment of your inventory, and grinding out basic upgrades to perks and trinkets. Oh, trinkets are equippable passive items, they drop in abundance and are exactly as underwhelming as any other form of loot.
Was any of this shit worth downsizing the series’ most important aspect? Levels are streamlined yet barren, there’s a lot of quiet downtime between the action, and the majority of battles just aren’t as epic in scale as they are in the mainline series. It has its moments, especially on later “acts” when mobs come out in huge numbers, but even that’s been compromised by Shatterverse’s very specific changes - you now have to worry about reviving others, which is an outright impossibility during the toughest swarms, and the only reliable form of healing is from melee finishers.
That last part speaks to just how poorly considered Shatterverse is. Trying to whittle down enemies to a sliver of health so you can punch them is tricky enough to do solo, much worse when other players are shooting at them too. Additionally, relying on a finicky melee kill that lunges you into the horde risks losing much more than the pathetic five hit points you’ll get for succeeding. The only other healing is bought between maps, found rarely in chests, or comes from a perk with which mobs to drop pickups in such low quantities as to be barely noticeable. Proper health items have always been part of the series, so taking them out in favor of an explicitly worse system is astounding.
I mentioned that up to five players can cooperate together, but the chances of this occurring seem to be miniscule. Sad fact is, it can be difficult to find more than one other player to run with at a time, and that’s only when matchmaking’s gated behind weird error messages. I don’t know how well this thing sold, but I couldn’t get more than a team of three together when it launched. I can’t tell you much about “act” three either, as it’s overwhelming for a solo player but I can’t find other players for it at all. Until that point, however, the game’s notably easier when running solo - that’s what you want from a cooperative experience, right?
Even if the game somehow sold a ton of copies, players would almost definitely bounce before long. There’s no meaningful progression hook, loot drops are disappointing, upgrades are unexciting, runs are brief and shallow, the characters are crap, and it’s all by apparent design. As a supposed roguelite, Shatterverse misses the mark in every conceivable way, deficient to a shocking degree.
It’s not a particularly broken release, but a couple of significant issues offer regular irritation. The biggest problem occurs when warping to self-contained challenge rooms, which sometimes fail to load properly and trap players in a void underneath the map. As noted earlier, matchmaking itself is pretty buggered up, regularly refusing to even look for players. Beyond that, UI navigation is eccentric - the trinkets menu jumps all over the place and your inventory randomly selects things whenever you try selling stuff with other players around.
Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a Serious Sam game without the charm and a roguelite without the roguelite. It wants to try something different but doesn’t try hard enough for it to work, layering only the flimsiest towel of a concept atop a skeletal frame. A promising creative conceit is wasted, an incentive to play isn’t evident, and all it really achieves is making me want to redownload the older Serious Sam games because they’re actually pretty great.
5/10
