Sam “Serious” Stone knows how life is: the only good headless kamikaze Sirian cyborg is a dead headless kamikaze Sirian cyborg.

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.

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What’s Serious Sam like in HD? Well, it’s like Serious Sam. It plays exactly, and unapologetically, like the 2001 original. Croatian developers Croteam are confident that this, along with the engine’s new jinglier bells and noisier whistles, is enough to tempt you to spend the best part of twenty quid. They also wouldn’t mind if you forgot that the alternative is rooting around a second-hand bargain bin and picking up a dusty old copy of the eight-year-old original for fifty pence.

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