Serious Sam: Shatterverse Launches Tomorrow, and This Time There Are Five Sams

August closes with one last loud one. Serious Sam: Shatterverse launches tomorrow, August 31, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and it is the strangest shape this series has ever taken. Behaviour Interactive, the studio best known for Dead by Daylight, is developing, Devolver Digital is publishing, and the pitch is a first person shooter roguelite built for one to five players in online co-op.

The story setup leans all the way into the multiverse. Uber Mental has fractured the walls between universes, and the fix involves multiple versions of Sam Stone from different dimensions learning to work together. In practice that means you and up to four friends each play a Sam, fighting through hand-crafted arenas across multiple worlds on the way to five lieutenant bosses. Cross-platform multiplayer is confirmed, so a mixed squad of PC and console players can run together from day one.

Video: Devolver Digital on YouTube

How the roguelite loop works

The Steam page is upfront about the structure: death is never the end, and each run opens the door to new strategies. Between runs you unlock boons, experiment with run modifiers that reshape how a session plays, and earn upgrades that permanently expand your options. The arsenal mixes classic Serious Sam weapons with new ones, which matters, because half the appeal of this series has always been the specific feeling of holding a cannon while a hundred headless screamers sprint at you.

It is a real departure for a franchise that built its name on enormous linear levels and absurd enemy counts. Whether the wave-clearing chaos survives the translation into procedural runs is the big question, and the PC playtest Devolver ran on Steam ahead of launch suggests they wanted that answer before release day rather than after. If you like your shooters loud and old-school, October's Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is chasing a similar crowd from the retro angle, and the Modern Warfare 4 beta has the more modern end covered this weekend.

Our take

We are cautiously optimistic. Behaviour knows how to keep a multiplayer game alive for years, Devolver rarely publishes lazy work, and Serious Sam with friends has always been the best way to play Serious Sam. The roguelite label will scare off some longtime fans, and no price was live on the store pages when we checked, so watch for that at launch. But a five player co-op horde shooter arriving on a quiet Monday at the end of summer feels like smart timing, and we would rather see this series try something weird than reheat Serious Sam 4.