Game Reviews

If you're looking for subtlety, you won't find it here. Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter is a self-consciously bombastic game, and one concentrating so hard to channel the spirit of DOOM it probably forgot what it was originally supposed to be doing and accidentally ended up in 2010.

In all honestly, most people probably didn't play Serious Sam SD: The Second Encounter when it was first released in 2002, so this new bump-mapped redux will arrive without a healthy dose of historical context. That's fine: those things on the screen? Shoot them.

But even scarier is the thought of today's youth being so young they've probably not even played DOOM, the spiffing game Serious Sam modelled itself on. The closest these children have come to id's seminal 1993 classic is through the occasional appearance of it on dodgy 90s movies, back when everyone had flat tops and mobile phones the size of lampshades. This game's target audience is probably people that were too young to legally play Serious Sam in the early noughties, but did anyway, and are now well into their twenties.

It's still good, though, and there are a few reasons the mindless monster gibbing still works as well as it does. It's not that Sam Stone is a time travelling do-gooder out to make the future a better place - kind of like Dr Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap with a chaingun and a penchant for dismemberments - but that the game feeds on our most carnal and primitive desire to blast things into meaty chunks with rocket launchers.

It's an old-fashioned game at heart, and also one less complex than a two-piece jigsaw puzzle. But that doesn't make it simple, as the bulk of game involves frantically dodging hordes of frothy-mouthed monsters desperate to make a bee-line right for your heroic face.

Mustering the herds is the main order of the day, so it's all about thinning down a couple of hundred Kleer (leaping skeletal quadrupeds with hooks for hands) whilst making sure you don't get battered by a charging Sirian Werebull.