During today's Xbox Partner Showcase, Devolver Digital showed up to reveal a brand new Serious Sam game. But it's not being made by the usual developer, Croteam. Instead, Dead by Daylight dev Behaviour Interactive is wandering into the blast zone with Serious Sam: Shatterverse.
Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a new co-op FPS where teams of five players, playing as a group of Sams from alternate dimensions, travel across shifting universes to repair the "Shatterverse". In a press release shared with IGN, I particularly enjoyed this line sharing one of the game's features: "Wield a big, loud, stupid and frankly irresponsible arsenal of weapons, mixing classic Serious Sam guns and all-new toys plucked from the Shatterverse." Yeah, that sounds like Serious Sam!
Here are the rest of the features, per the release:
- High adrenaline run-and-gun FPS combat with big battlefields, non-stop pressure, a lot of backpedaling and perfectly timed one-liners when everything’s on fire
- Leans into Serious Sam’s legacy and pushes it forward with procedurally shifted runs across hand-crafted arenas set in previously unexplored worlds
- Navigate unstable anomalies, hidden portals and high-risk opportunities that can supercharge a run – or end it instantly
- Push forward for greater rewards, unlock powerful modifiers, and take advantage of upgrades that permanently expand your possibilities
- Face off against massive hordes of enemies including classic Serious Sam foes and fresh monsters under Mental’s control, all begging to be gibbed
No release date just yet, but it's planned for launch later this year on Xbox Series, PS5, and PC.
This is hardly the first time Serious Sam has been handed off to someone else. While the main series has historically always been helmed by Croteam, a number of spinoffs have launched over the years by a variety of other studios. The most recent was Serious Sam: Tormental in 2022, a twin-stick rogue-lite developed by Gungrounds for PC that only received mixed reviews. Behaviour, meanwhile, has a long, long history of taking on other companies' IPs and making successful spin-offs, assisting on games like Fallout Shelter and the series Silent Hill: Ascension. They also, notably, already have a highly successful co-op game in Dead by Daylight.
“Our main goal was to respect Serious Sam's rich legacy while presenting it in a fresh, contemporary way unlike anything seen before in the series,” said Behaviour Interactive’s Nic Duchesne. “Working with Devolver has been an incredible, enriching experience for our team. The folks there are real renegades of the video game publishing world: they always put the game first and aren’t afraid to carve their own path.”
You can catch up on everything announced at today's Xbox Partner Showcase right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
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