Serious Sam II

I've spent enough time with horde shooters to know when one is doing something genuinely fun versus when it's just padding a kill counter, and Serious Sam II sits firmly in the first camp - most of the time. Croteam leaned hard into a cartoonish, candy-colored art style for this sequel, a move that alienated some longtime fans of the grittier original but gives the game a wild, anarchic personality that still holds up. You're Sam Stone, tasked with collecting five pieces of a medallion by hopping across wildly different alien worlds - snow planets, fairy-tale cities, lava-drenched Kleer, Asian carnivals - and the variety in environments does more to keep things fresh than the paper-thin story ever could. The shooting loop is exactly what the series built its reputation on: massive open arenas, hundreds of enemies closing in from all directions, and an ever-expanding arsenal to throw at them. The classic loadout is here - double-barreled shotgun, minigun, rocket launcher, cannon - alongside newer toys like the Klodovik, the homing parrot bomb, dual Uzis, and the Hydro-Plasmatic Handgun with its seeking fire mode. A 2021 community-driven update added even more on top, including the BeamGun, a flamethrower, dual-wield for every weapon in the game, sprint, and rocket jump. That update alone makes the Steam version the definitive way to play. The game also throws in mounted turrets, rideable animals, and vehicles like hover cars and a rolling ball of death that are genuinely more exciting to use than most shooters' set pieces. From a multiplayer angle, this is where Serious Sam II gets interesting. Online co-op supports up to 16 players through the full 42-level campaign, and the enemy count scales dynamically as players join and leave. Deathmatch is available too, though net-code issues historically made it a mess and the community never warmed to it anyway - co-op is where the action is. Here's the one thing that will sting couch-party fans: split-screen is gone. No local co-op whatsoever. If your plan was four people crammed on a sofa passing controllers, this is not your game. Online only, which in 2025 means server population is thin outside of private lobbies with friends. The honest weaknesses are real but well-documented. Wave structure gets repetitive in extended sessions, with many levels ending not on a boss but simply on the last enemy dying mid-field. The humor, a big part of Sam's identity, lands maybe half the time - the one-liners start recycling embarrassingly before the credits roll, and the cutscene comedy is inconsistent. The Metacritic score of 74 is a fair landing spot: this is a competent, energetic game that doesn't push any envelope but also never stops being kinetic, loud fun in the right company. Bottom line for you specifically: if you have a group of friends willing to set up an online session and shoot anything that moves for a few hours, Serious Sam II punches well above its age. Solo, it's a solid boomer-shooter binge that runs out of tricks about two-thirds through. Go in expecting a theme park ride, not a chess match.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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