Devolver Digital has spent a decade publishing shooters that feel like a joke you are in on. Serious Sam: Shatterverse, out in August for PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X|S, is the first one that feels like a joke the studio is still workshopping in public. Developed by Behaviour Interactive, it is a co-op roguelite first-person shooter for one to five players. The pitch is exactly what the title promises: Sam, many Sams, many universes, many things to kill.
It was announced in March 2026 and shipped five months later. That turnaround shows.
Trailer, via DevolverDigital.
Five Sams, One Shifting Universe
The setup is thin even by the standards of a series built on thin setups. Up to five players take control of versions of the titular Serious Sam pulled from alternate dimensions. The conceit exists to justify the roster, not to generate a story. There is no campaign here in any meaningful sense, and Devolver has not pretended otherwise.
What Serious Sam: Shatterverse offers instead is wave-based combat across procedurally generated runs. You and up to four others drop into a shifting universe, fight through waves of Mental’s forces, and try to stay upright long enough to build something. The game’s own summary puts it best: “Fall fast. Come back louder.”
That is the entire loop, and it is a good loop. The series has always been about backpedaling through a swarm while firing into it, and Shatterverse understands that the pleasure is in the panic, not the precision.
Boons, Modifiers, and the Rules You Bend
Where the roguelite structure earns its keep is in the upgrades. Each run lets players enhance their arsenal, and the game layers two systems on top of that: boons, which stack, and run modifiers, which bend the rules of the run itself. The summary calls the boons “wild,” and for once the marketing word is accurate.
Stacking matters because it creates the only real decision-making in the game. Do you take the upgrade that makes your current weapon absurd, or the one that sets up a combo three waves from now? With five players, that question gets asked five times per run, and the answers will not always agree.
The run modifiers are the more interesting half. They let a group tilt the rules of a run before it starts, which is a smart way to let a squad calibrate difficulty without a menu full of sliders. It also means two runs of Serious Sam: Shatterverse can feel like different games.
Procedural Generation Is the Weak Link
Here is where the game stumbles. Procedurally generated runs are a promise of variety, and Serious Sam: Shatterverse delivers breadth without much shape. Arenas blur together. Wave compositions vary, but the rhythm does not.
The first-person perspective is correct for this series and the shooting feels like the shooting always has. That is a compliment. What is missing is the hand-authored set piece, the moment where a designer has decided exactly how badly they want to hurt you. Randomness cannot replicate cruelty. It can only approximate it.
Behaviour Interactive has built a game that is reliably fun and rarely memorable. For a co-op shooter you play in bursts with friends, that may be enough. For a roguelite, it is a real problem, because roguelites live or die on the run you want to tell someone about.
One to Five Players, and the Math Matters
Serious Sam: Shatterverse supports single player, standard multiplayer and cooperative play, and the co-op is clearly the point. Solo runs work. They are also noticeably thinner, because the boon-stacking and modifier systems were built around negotiation.
Five is the number the game wants. Four is comfortable. Two is fine. One is a challenge run whether you intended it or not.
This is not a flaw so much as a design commitment, and it is worth being honest about what it means for buyers. If you do not have a regular group, Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a harder sell than its price tag suggests. The game does not meet you halfway.
Where Shatterverse Sits in the Series
Serious Sam has always been a franchise about volume. Enemies in numbers, weapons with absurd capacity, levels that go on longer than they should. Shatterverse keeps the volume and swaps the structure, trading linear campaigns for repeatable runs.
That trade costs the series some of its identity. The old games were memorable because someone built those arenas by hand and filled them with intent. Shatterverse is a machine that generates arenas, and machines are consistent but not clever.
It also gains something. The series has never been this good with other people. Co-op has always been technically supported, but Shatterverse is the first entry designed around a squad from the ground up, and the boon and modifier systems give a group something to argue about between waves.
The Verdict on Serious Sam: Shatterverse
Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a competent co-op shooter wearing a roguelite’s clothes, and the fit is loose. The shooting is solid, the boon stacking is genuinely entertaining, and the run modifiers give squads real control over how strange a run gets. What it lacks is authorship. Procedural generation keeps the game from ever surprising you in a way that feels designed rather than rolled.
The August release window and the five-month gap from announcement suggest Devolver and Behaviour Interactive knew what they had: a solid genre exercise, not a flagship. That is a fair read. Serious Sam: Shatterverse is the kind of game you and four friends play for three weeks, enjoy thoroughly, and then stop thinking about. There is nothing wrong with that. There is also nothing here that will pull you back a year from now.
Buy it if you have a squad and a taste for chaos. Skip it if you are playing alone, or if you want a roguelite with runs worth remembering. The boons stack. The universes shift. The game, in the end, does not.
Hard Numbers
- Title: Serious Sam: Shatterverse
- Developer: Behaviour Interactive
- Publisher: Devolver Digital
- Release: August 2026
- Announced: March 2026
- Platforms: PlayStation 5, Windows (PC), Xbox Series X|S
- Genre: First-person shooter, roguelite
- Players: 1–5, single player, multiplayer, co-operative
- Score: 7 of 10
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