Serious Sam: Tormental

Final Thought

Serious Potential

Positives:

• Visually, I quite like Tormental. It has a nice blocky cartoon style, I do think it’s a bit reminiscent of mobile games such as Crossy Road, but I think it works well for the game so I’m not complaining. There are a couple of odd animations, but for the most part those are good too.
• Gameplay wise, Tormental is a fairly straightforward top-down shooter. It occupies a kind of middle ground between Gungeon and NT I think, a little more fast paced than Gungeon but not quite as hectic as NT. There’s a nice kind of feedback to the game, it feels punchy. Especially if you get a weapon mod to increase your knockback. But yeah, essentially, you’re shooting and evading for the most part.
• There’s a decent amount of weapon variation (but I definitely want to see more before full release). You have an evolvable gun and a ‘Serious’ weapon. The evolvable gun is essentially just a pistol, you start each run with it. You’ll find chests along the run that drop weapon mods to change what the pistol does, such as a chance to set enemies on fire; a chance to freeze enemies; homing rounds; shotgun modification etc. Your ‘Serious’ weapon is more powerful but is also more limited in use. You get one at the start of your run, and there are actually more Serious weapons than evolvable mods so there’s a lot of variation with them. I think they’re fairly well balanced, I haven’t really come across any that I think are over or underpowered.
• The game is nicely challenging. I don’t think it’s too difficult, but as with any rogue-lite there’s certainly a learning curve. For example, my first hour of gameplay saw a majority of runs ending at the first boss, and only a few making it to the second level. Whereas in my second hour, I’ve been more consistently reaching the second level.
• There aren’t exactly synergies, but there is some strategy to combining mods and Serious weapons. For example, the knockback mod compliments the freezegun Serious weapon really well. Plus, some mods go really well together.
• On the main menu you’ll find a ‘Mindmap’. This menu keeps track of challenges, mods, Serious weapons and powers. It’s a good way of keeping track of what you have done/unlocked. I haven’t gotten too far with the challenges yet, but supposedly you unlock more things by completing them. I’ll update this section as soon as possible.
• You don’t need any knowledge of the Serious Sam franchise to enjoy it. I’m having great fun with the game despite not really liking Serious Sam.
• The devs are super responsive in the forums, which is great to see for an Early Access game. I posted a thread and had replies from two different devs in under ten minutes.

Negatives:

• You fight the same boss at the end of an area each time you get to the end of said area. It’s not a huge issue, but it definitely makes the game feel a little less varied to me than I would expect from a rogue-lite.
• Enemy variety is also a little lacklustre currently. Each area has a handful of different enemies, and some of them are essentially just bigger versions of other enemies. It’s not awful, especially for an Early Access game, but this also has an impact on the feeling of run variety.
• No way to save and quit during a run.

Verdict: