Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope
Information
VR/AR	VR
Developer	Croteam VR
Publisher	Devolver Digital, Croteam
Platform	SteamVR, Oculus Rift (Platform)
Device	HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality
Operating System	Windows
Type	Game
Genre	Action, Indie, Gore, VR, Violent, FPS, Shooter
Input Device	Tracked Motion Controllers
Play Area	Seated, Standing, Room-Scale
Game Mode	Single Player, Multiplayer, Online Multiplayer, Co-Op, Online Co-Op
Language	English
Release Date	October 17, 2016 (Early Access); September 20, 2017 (full release)
Price	US$29.99 (Steam, October 2026); US$39.99 at launch
App Store	Steam, Oculus Store (now Meta Horizon Store)
Website	http://www.croteam.com
Infobox Updated	10/21/2026

Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope is a virtual reality first-person wave shooter developed by Croteam VR, the VR division of the Croatian studio Croteam, and published by Devolver Digital and Croteam for Windows PCs. It was the first VR game in the Serious Sam series and Croteam's first Early Access title. Announced at E3 on 13 June 2016, it entered Steam Early Access on 17 October 2016 for the HTC Vive, added Oculus Rift support with Oculus Touch controllers later that year, and left Early Access with its full release on 20 September 2017.

The player stays in one place, or moves within a small room-scale area, and fights waves of enemies that approach mostly from a 180-degree arc in front of them, using two motion-tracked weapons at once. The finished game has 20 levels, four on each of five planets, five bosses, 16 weapons plus a shield, a skill and power-up system, two-player online co-op, and three randomly generated modes with global leaderboards. As of October 2026 it is still sold on Steam for US$29.99 and on the Meta Horizon Store as a PC VR title.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Release dates, update history, prices, platforms, gameplay systems, development and exclusivity statements, quotes, reception summary and current store status. About review dates.

Gameplay

The Last Hope is framed as a training simulation based on the log files of Sam "Serious" Stone, the Earth Defense Force's best-known hero, from his time as captain of the Battlecruiser Saratoga. The game's hub is a spaceship in orbit, from which the player picks a mission and travels to a planet. Each planet mission is broken into four stages, each in a different environment, and ends with a boss. Settings include Egyptian deserts and ruins and Pladeon, the long-abandoned center of an industrial civilization; the first boss is the Unholy Space Mummy of Gamma Pegasi. Serious Sam is voiced by John J. Dick, who delivers the character's one-liners during play.

Enemies arrive in waves from several elevations, mostly within a 180-degree field in front of the player, so the player rarely has to turn around. Designer Mario Kotlar said the team considered enemies coming from behind but decided against it because it was hard to develop and because players who die without knowing why find it annoying; he added that a full 360-degree design would have prevented full support for the Oculus Rift, whose tracking at the time did not work well when the player turned fully around. Some levels take place on moving platforms, including an open-air elevator ride. The game can be played standing or seated, and its room-scale support lets the player step aside to dodge incoming projectiles, which becomes necessary on higher difficulties.

Weapons, shop and pickups

The player starts each mission with unlimited laser pistols and can wield any two weapons at once, one in each hand, including two of the same weapon. Between stages the player spends money earned in combat in a shop on new weapons, ammunition and health; items are bought by aiming at them and shooting. Ammunition counts are shown on the weapons themselves rather than on a heads-up display. Health, ammunition and money also drop into levels on parachutes, and the player collects them by shooting them, which fires a grappling hook that pulls the item in.

The final game has 16 weapons and a shield. The arsenal includes pistols, shotguns, tommy guns, assault rifles, heavy laser guns, a rocket launcher, a minigun, a hand cannon that fires cannonballs, a chainsaw, a power sword that can also send out energy shockwaves, and a bow with piercing and explosive arrows. Sam's personal shield was added with the Shaanti update.

Skills, power-ups and difficulty

A skill tree added in July 2017 gives the player active and passive abilities, bought in the shop alongside weapons and ammunition. Skill points are earned by completing planets, with more points awarded at higher difficulties. Abilities include tactical orbital lasers and plasma cannons, slowing down time, holographic decoys, swarms of flying quadcopters, an army of spiders, minigun turrets and large explosions such as the Serious Bomb. Weapon upgrades are unlocked by completing perfect runs, one per difficulty per planet, and a few more are found in the skill tree. At full release the game had 36 power-ups and 190 weapon upgrades.

The game ended Early Access with five difficulty settings: Tourist, Easy, Normal, Hard and Serious. According to Croteam, enemy swarms had always been designed with the skills and power-ups in mind, and lead designer Davor Hunski said that the game "is hard, even on Normal, if you don't master the gunplay AND the power-ups."

Co-op and arena modes

Every level can be played online with a second player, who can choose either Serious Sam or Serious Sammy. A player waiting for a partner can start alone; when the partner joins, the current wave restarts. The full release added three randomly generated modes, played on five existing and three new levels. Arena has 8 arenas of 4 waves each, every one playable on 20 difficulties, and beating an arena difficulty awards a weapon upgrade icon. Endless Wave sends an endless wave of enemies at the player, who tries to survive as long as possible. Daily Challenge is an endless wave on the arena map of the day, with the same set of enemies for every player that day. All three modes have global leaderboards.

Development

Croteam began experimenting with VR after receiving development kits for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and first added support for both headsets to The Talos Principle. When the team then added VR support to Serious Sam, it ran into the problem of movement: the developers did not want players to experience nausea or headaches, and decided that movement should be either teleportation or room-scale, with the player able to move only about a meter to either side. A standing shooter was, in their words, the simpler solution. Croteam staff also played many of the VR games then on Steam and were not satisfied with them, which they gave as one reason for making the game.

Davor Hunski said that he knew he wanted to make a VR game the first time he tried a headset, but that the rest of the team needed convincing because the technology was new and the install base was very small. Croteam formed Croteam VR, a small studio inside the studio led by Hunski, to make the game. Croteam described the game as a love letter to old arcade machines, and Hunski said it is "easy to pick up" but hard to truly master. Developers said they had to optimize and add detail to art because VR requires a constant frame rate and the player is mostly stationary, and that they tweaked existing Serious Sam art, weapons and monsters, mostly their behavior, while also creating new environments, monsters and weapons. The team used Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya and MotionBuilder together with Croteam's Serious Engine. Croteam named laser guns and the skill tree as additions to the series' traditional weapon layout, and brought back dual wielding, which had appeared in Serious Sam 2.

Jonas and Verena Kyratzes wrote the game's narrative elements, including the level descriptions and Sam's voiced lines. They came up with the concept of a training simulation based on Sam's experiences, which places the story within the existing Serious Sam canon while leaving room for later stories, since Sam's versions of events are not necessarily accurate. Croteam picked one of several introductions the writers proposed, and the mini-story for each level was built around the existing environments and boss fights.

For promotion, Croteam had three minigun props built as controllers. According to creative director Damjan Mravunac, each one was assembled from parts such as PVC pipes and a cordless drill, held an HTC Vive controller in its left chamber for tracking, and had a trigger that both spun the barrels and pressed the Vive controller's main trigger. Building the first working prototype took one month.

Exclusivity offer

Around the June 2016 announcement, Kotlar said that Oculus VR had offered Croteam a large sum of money to make the game temporarily exclusive to the Oculus Rift, and that the studio had turned it down: "we believe that truly good games will sell by themselves and make profit in the long run regardless," he wrote. "And also because we hate exclusives as much as you do." Oculus said in response that it sometimes funds games in exchange for a first launch on the Oculus Store, and that it had never asked Croteam to stop developing for other platforms. Croteam's chief technology officer, Alen Ladavac, confirmed that Oculus had offered to help fund the game's completion in exchange for a timed exclusive launch on the Oculus Store, that Croteam had decided the offer was not right for the team, and that total exclusivity was never discussed.

Early Access

The game was expected in Steam Early Access in summer 2016 but arrived on 17 October 2016, playable at first only with the HTC Vive, with two planets, Earth and Pladeon. Croteam used the Early Access period, which lasted eleven months, to add planets, weapons, enemies and features in response to player feedback. Cooperative play had not been planned; Hunski said that adding it because players asked for it added two months of extra work and disrupted the schedule of planned updates, and he joked: "I'm never doing Early Access again!" Another frequent request was free movement around the maps, but Croteam said that adding full locomotion would have meant remaking most levels and abandoning the arcade concept. The studio instead prototyped movement in a VR version of The First Encounter, which became the separate Early Access game Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter.

In April 2017, during a football match at the Reboot Develop conference, Hunski injured his shoulder and needed surgery, and developer Davor Tomičić broke a bone in his right arm; according to Croteam, both returned to the office soon afterwards and finished work on the Arcadia Minor and arena updates on painkillers.

Date	Update	Main changes
20 October 2016	Build 276060	New incremental patching system; adjustable weapon trigger threshold
25 October 2016	Build 276580	Support for Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch through SteamVR; automatic use of the GPU the headset is connected to; mixed reality setup wizard
22 November 2016	Build 279777	Support for NVIDIA VR SLI
15 December 2016	Build 284170	Two-player online co-op campaign; new Tourist and Serious difficulties
1 March 2017	Shaanti (build 293518)	New planet Shaanti with four locations, nine new enemies and a boss; masking of screen areas hidden by lens distortion; portrait camera mode for mixed reality
10 March 2017	Build 294810	Co-op on Shaanti; four firing modes for the laser sword; Chinese localization of the store text
26 April 2017	Valtos (build 301602)	New planet Valtos (The Swamp, Ancient Breeze, The Old Forest, Green Dream); three new weapons including the bow and the Devastator; six new enemies; Swamp Hive boss; regenerating sword energy
6 June 2017	Arcadia	New planet Arcadia Minor (Sea Breeze, Meadow of Death, The Lost Valley, The Final Breath); new cannon; four new enemies; Earth Giant boss; saving mid-planet
28 July 2017	Skills and Power-Ups (build 314653)	Skill tree, weapon upgrades for perfect runs, inverse kinematics
20 September 2017	1.0	Full release: Arena, Endless Wave and Daily Challenge modes, three new levels, leaderboards, Serious Sammy as a co-op character
4 December 2017	Build 333254	Performance improvements for Vulkan and DirectX 12
22 February 2018	Build 343641	Official support for Windows Mixed Reality controllers
12 May 2025	Hotfix	Fix for a license verification error

Release

Devolver Digital and Croteam announced the game at E3 on 13 June 2016 with a teaser trailer. The Early Access release on 17 October 2016 cost US$39.99, with a 20% discount in its first week, and the price was expected to stay the same as content was added. Support for the Rift with Touch controllers was added through SteamVR on 25 October 2016, and on 8 December 2016, the week Oculus Touch began shipping, Croteam announced that the game was available on the Oculus Store. The full release on 20 September 2017 came to both Steam and the Oculus Store, priced at US$39.99.

Platform	Store	Release date	Notes
HTC Vive (SteamVR)	Steam	17 October 2016 (Early Access); 20 September 2017 (full release)	US$39.99 at Early Access launch
Oculus Rift	Steam	25 October 2016 (Early Access update)	Rift with Oculus Touch through SteamVR
Oculus Rift	Oculus Store	8 December 2016 (Early Access); 20 September 2017 (full release)	Now sold on the Meta Horizon Store as a PC VR title

Croteam also made Serious Sam VR: Arcade, a version of The Last Hope for location-based venues such as arcades, VR parks and VR cafes. Venues activate it with a renewable license, and an Arcade Launcher lets the operator configure and remotely start sessions on one or two machines, choose modes, episodes, waves, timers, difficulty and gore settings, and control a running game. It supports VR peripherals such as guns, rifles and miniguns.

Croteam followed the game with VR versions of its older games: Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter, Serious Sam 3 VR: BFE (released on 9 November 2017) and The Talos Principle VR. In January 2020, NVIDIA listed The Last Hope among the first games supported by Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS), a driver feature for RTX graphics cards. As of October 2026, the game is still sold on Steam for US$29.99, where its user reviews are rated "Very Positive", and on the Meta Horizon Store as a PC VR title for Link. The most recent announced update, a May 2025 hotfix, fixed a license verification error that had affected the game for some time.

Reception

Impressions during Early Access were mixed. Some previews praised the intensity of the waves, the feel of dual-wielding guns with tracked controllers, and how well the series' arcade style suited VR; one reviewer said it was the longest they had played any VR game without discomfort. Others called it derivative, another stand-and-shoot game among many on the HTC Vive, and said that it did not quite feel like a true series entry.

The full release was received positively. Reviewers praised its pacing, which mixes slow starts with sharp escalations and boss fights, the strategy involved in choosing weapons, shields, skills and power-ups, its visuals and its variety of weapons and enemies. Criticism focused on large jumps between difficulty levels, inconsistent co-op matchmaking with server errors, a small player base for co-op and the leaderboards, and an occasional bug in which a gun stopped responding. Hunski himself acknowledged the genre label: "A wave shooter? Sure, you can say that, and we're aware of current sentiment in the VR community." In 2020 the game was still recommended in a list of the best PC VR games, which described it as an accessible, affordable wave shooter.

Features

System Requirements

Windows

Minimum

OS: Windows 7 64bit
Processor: Intel Core i5 - 4590 equivalent
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD R9 290 or NVIDIA GTX 970
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 10 GB available space