Waves generally start out slow, but ramp up quickly, give you a little breather in the middle, then rise again to a grand crescendo, often with a mega-sized boss staring you down. The pace and stratagem of Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope are some of my favorite aspects of the game.

After popping down to Easy for my first few sessions, it allowed me to upgrade my weapons and skills, and also helped me remember the enemy spawn and movement patterns. When I first jumped in ready to do some John Woo-style dual wielding action I started on Normal difficulty, but with access to just the basic laser pistols, that became a futile and punishing journey. To say Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope is frantic is a vast understatement. You can also play random-spawn Endless Wave and Arena modes with 8 planets apiece as well as Daily Challenges, but there aren’t many consistent players, so the leaderboards are littered with all the same names. Depending on how well you do and what difficulty level you’re playing on, you’ll gain weapon upgrades, skills and power-ups like double damage, massive orbital weapons and slowing down time.

There are even some levels that take place on a moving platform - both vertical and horizontal - adding a little variety and sense of mobility to the experience. Although you’re mostly planted in place and can even play from a seated position, The Last Hope is built for room scale so you can move around a bit within each environment. The core game consists of 20 levels: four missions on five planets. I will say that I’m personally getting a little burnt out on VR wave shooters, but The Last Hope is fast-paced, charming, twisted, fun and ultimately a wave shooter I’ve found myself going back to over and over again during the past week or so just to see if I can conquer the next level.

Even back then, early indicators pointed to this one being a winner, and Croteam continued to tweak, polish and add new planets and features to this classic PC shooter base over the course of the past 12 months. Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope recently came out of early access, where it’s been for almost a year.

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