Serum

I had high expectations on Serum. It was written by Steve Duda, man, who's been in the background of some of the most influental acts in electronic music, man, who I personally consider a genius. His LFO Tool finds it's way to every single production I make. He is a musical visionary. So did it meet the high hopes?

Features 9/10

...well let's start by the basics. It has 2 full featured OSCs, sub, noise, only 1 main filter and a FX section. So in terms of quantity, not so much. Even Sylenth 1 has more OSCs. But there are some extremely revolutionary features on this synth that make it absolute blast.
Let me start with the OSCs itself. It seems like quite usual wavetable stuff, but right when you assign your first modulation, you find out, that the graphical view of the waveform is updated and rendered realtime, so you know exactly how your waveform looks like at any moment.
When you open the edit window, you find out, that the wavetable is incredibly editable. So far I praised Zebra for having the best OSCs possible. Not anymore. This is mental. You can generate the signal using math functions, analyze wav files, draw them. Then edit them, add random content to them and so on and so on! You can morph between snapshots of the wavetable, further edit them by "wrap" FX. (I miss odd/even FX from Zebra though, but anyway, still great.) There's also a great 16 channel unisono as a bonus.
Moving down to the filter. Yes, I miss the second, parallel one. But you get tons of filter types (including really nice z-type-ish morphing ones) and it's graphical view is also realtime updated.
FX section has all the usual suspects, another filter, nice unisono-emulator, something that feels similar to Massive's dimension expander, really nice distortion module with another filter, compressor with multiband mode, eq, delay, reverb and so on... All the effects are reorderable and really cool sounding. One of the best in-synth FX section I've ever seen.
And then the modulation. Daaamn. You have all three options to create a modulation connection. Drag'n'drop, left-click assignment or standart matrix. All modulations show realtime values on screen and everything modulated by them is also moving. All the envelopes and LFOs have a realtime dot traveling across the shape to show you what part of the curve is currently playing out. Also all the LFOs have full feature set and editability of LFO Tool's LFOs, including shape presets.

GUI 10/10

Best gui on non-modular synth ever created. Period. All the realtime views allow you to quickly analyze what's wrong in your patch. It even helps you to discover bad habbits you've gained in other synths over the years. As mentioned earlier, modulation section is extremely good. Same goes for the wavetable editor. It's clearly visible that Steve's intention was to simplify otherwise really cumbersome tasks to the point it becomes quick and easy to do on regular basis. You can feel he knew all the weak spots of GUIs of literally every synth on the market, so when he made his own synthesizer, he avoided all of them. Newblies probably will get stuck a little, but definitely much less hard then in other feature-wise comparable synths. It's that good.

Sound 10/10

Ultra clean. Analog lovers will have to do some pitch modulation and EQ-ing to get the their feel, but come on. It's 2014, not 1970... Especially hi-end is amazing. That's something wavetable synths usually struggle with. Also no aliasing. It doesn't have a "character", but on purpose. You're free to make one. Or not. You decide. I've noticed really short CPU spikes causing clicks, but that's probably becouse of me running 96k on medicore machine. I really have no complains in this department what so ever.

Value for money 10/10

Huge. It's not really a biggest synth featurewise, but every single feature it has, have been tweaked and coded to absolute perfection. Also, you're buying the future my friend. Right now, this beast was endorsed by biggest names in the electronic music filed and thousands of bedroom kids, home producers and pro-guys are discovering it. I think we are about to see rise of complex patches in near future music thanks to this plugin's clever layout and no-nonsense politics. I love it.