"Serious Sam" Is Going VR, So Torture Yourself With Beheaded Kamikaze Screams In Full Immersion

Croteam dropped a "serious" bomb at E3 today. The independent developer is bringing Serious Sam to virtual reality. Headless men with bombs for hands have never been so terrifying!

Serious Sam first graced us with its presence in early 2001, when Serious Sam: First Encounter hit the market. The game was frantically fast-paced and featured an endless barrage of ridiculous enemies, such as the aforementioned Beheaded Kamikaze, which would run at you screaming (from where? They don’t have heads!) and holding two lit bombs--the Gnaar, which looks somewhat like a cyclops gorilla that will tear you to pieces, and the Kleer Skeletons, which charge at you from out of nowhere.

Croteam has released five Serious Sam games so far, including the original game and its sequel, plus remastered versions of the same games. The most recent installment was Serious Sam 3: BFE, which featured a brand new graphics engine and was released in 2011. This summer, Serious Sam makes its return in Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, and it looks like it will be filled with action-packed madness.

Serious Sam VR is basically a shooting gallery. Once you select a mission, you’ll be dropped onto the surface of one of two planets. You’ll have an arsenal of different weaponry, including pistols, assault rifles, rocket launchers and Gatling guns. Croteam said the weapons will be upgradeable between missions using in-game currency.

Serious Sam VR will be packed with cutting edge technology. AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, joined the PC Gaming Show at E3 and explained that Serious Sam VR is built with AMD’s Liquid VR technology. Croteam worked closely with AMD to ensure that you can put multiple GPUs to work efficiently in Serious Sam VR. Liquid VR separates the rendering work so that each eye gets a dedicated GPU. This technology will theoretically reduce latency and increase VR performance.

To our knowledge, Serious Sam VR will be the first title available that takes advantage of this feature of Liquid VR. Nvidia also has similar technology called VR SLI, and so far the only content that supports the feature is Nvidia’s own VR Funhouse, which hasn’t been released yet. Multiple GPUs should improve VR performance significantly.

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Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope will launch in Early Access on Steam later this summer. The game will support HTC Vive when it launches. Croteam is also developing the game to work with Oculus Touch when the motion controllers become available.

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Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.

2 Comments Comment from the forums

clonazepam

Croteam supposedly turned down a boatload of money from Facebook/Oculus to make it an exclusive.

Looking forward to VR exclusives /s
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hellwig

Man, I hate the frantic feeling when you hear that screaming and can't quite tell where it's coming from, spinning around desperately trying to find the source. It was bad enough with a mouse, now I gotta spin my actual head around? Hello Whiplash!

When Cro-Engine came out, I couldn't believe how good the graphics looked. Smoke, Fog, reflections, negative light, it was all really amazing at the time. But no publishers ever picked up the engine that I could tell. Glad to see Croteam still working on new tech.
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