Serious Sam II

Format Xbox

Developer Croteam

Publisher Unknown

Genre First Person Shooter

"We have no idea what they're going to put in there", Take 2 tells us of Serious Sam developer Croteam. "Sometimes the testers have to take screenshots of what they've seen just so anyone believes them. Last month one of them found a secret awning hung up high on a skyscraper. It was an in-game picture of Sam with his jeans round his ankles, taking the most luxurious dump. He was even giving a thumbs-up." Not so much an omen perhaps, more a sign of what Sam's plans for the competition come November.

"Somewhere along the line, first-person shooters forgot that they were supposed to be just that. Look back at the original Doom. It was non-stop. That's where Sam is coming from, where he's always come from in fact." We're surprised. When fighting waves of exploding clowns we defy anyone to know where they're supposed to be coming from.

Sam knows though - he's been here before. Back in 2002 Croteam developed Serious Sam, a brash, ultraviolent budget shooter which spawned something of a cult following with its outlandish characters and non-stop stampedes of enemies. It was the cure for itchy trigger-finger syndrome.

Poor Sam though - just when arch-nemesis Mental looks like he's gone for good, the spirits of the Sirian elders summon Sam to help them. A mysterious medallion of dazzling power has been broken up and scattered throughout the farthest corners of the universe. Seven worlds, 42 levels and endless enemies are all that stand between Sam and Mental regaining his powers. Time to fetch the cannonball gun again, then?

Playing Serious Sam II for the first time is a little like firing a nailgun into your own head. From the outset the forces of Mental are out trooping the colours, 50 on screen at any one time. It's the only FPS we can think of where you spent more time walking backwards than forwards. The endless waves of bad guys, the paper-thin plot, and brightly coloured visuals are just the tonic, but Croteam is being careful not to simply rehash what we've seen before.

New weapons are being introduced that may well have those testers rubbing their eyes and taking screenshots. The most noticeable is the erm, parroty-homing-bomb-thing which conveniently flies over to a target, drops a bomb, then comes back for more. If however, he doesn't find anything worth blowing up, the stupid bastard will come fluttering back, and drop the bomb at you. There are over a dozen weapons, ranging from a new plasma machine gun (spatters enemies blue before dissolving them), to the revolving pump-action shotgun.

Sam himself has new skills too, such as 'Serious Strength'. Thanks to some gloriously daft interpretations of what physics can do, when Sam powers up, he can rip chunks of scenery from around him and hurl them like weapons. He can pick up market stalls, boulders, vehicles, and anything that isn't bolted down, then send it careering across the screen, knocking everything over like skittles. We picked up a barrow and rammed it into a hole through which were pouring bad guys. They all backed up against it, then we rolled over a fizzing cannonball and the whole lot went up, raining down all kinds of fillets and organs a few seconds later.

For the new instalment, Croteam has been conjuring up an assortment of inventive and original enemies, ranging from ankle-biters to cloud-munchers. If it isn't small rocks suddenly sprouting legs and turning into scuttling bombs, it's a giant set of mechanised legs controlled by a detached T-Rex head. A detached T-Rex head that smokes cigars.

And although we've run screeching from robot spiders the size of 747s, those are only the 'medium-sized' enemies, apparently. We caught the faintest glimpse of an end-of-level boss before a cut-scene kicked in (Croteam didn't include them on our preview version so as not to spoil the surprise), and he was terrifying. Well, his ankles were, anyway. Word has it Croteam has submitted an application to the Guinness Book of Records, in the 'biggest videogame character' category.

With 50 bad guys on screen at once, Croteam will easily be able to accommodate a few of the medium-sized ones on screen at once too. At one point we could have been in a forest there were so many spiders above us. The legs formed a thicket so dense the only way out was to jump in a familiar-looking 'hover-tank' and vaporise them all. The horrible bomb-head kamikaze runners are back too, sprinting towards you screaming high-pitched wails before exploding in your face. And if giant albino cyclopes ridden by lightning throwing she-devils isn't enough to put the willies up you, how about a little gladiator action? Men roll about in giant hamster balls, which you can hijack and then set off on a body-battering roll around the environments, splattering the countryside with jammy innards.

The hamster balls and hover tanks aren't the only vehicles, either - you can float about on barges mounted with miniguns to fend off chopper attacks, or climb on a quad bike. If you're careful and don't 'do an Ozzy', you can spend entire missions on one, crushing all before you under your huge wheels. And every vehicle comes with some kind of mounted gun, with infinite ammunition. The word 'subtle' clearly doesn't exist in Croteam's vocabulary.

It certainly isn't a word we'd use to describe the seven game worlds, either. So far we've seen fire and brimstone, the land of the giants, hovering cloud castles, an island paradise, and a Blade Runner-esque rain-swept metropolis. The Aztec/Egyptian theme of the first game has been replaced with hellish Brothers Grimm-inspired landscapes this time, too. These lovingly created environments are more or less fully destructible, too. You'll be able to destroy foliage and buildings as though they were sandcastles. And up in the land of the giants there's a huge wooden treehouse city - we've heard that if you're not careful, a misplaced parrot has the ability to bring the whole lot clattering down like so much matchwood.

As for multiplayer modes? It'd be a damned shame not to introduce such a range of mentalist monsters and then restrict it to solo players. We hear a co-op mode that'll support up to four people at once is currently being worked on, each of whom will be armed with a different weapon and thrown into a game to stay alive as long as possible - not so easy when there are ?enemy dropships circling above, dropping rampaging clockwork rhinos into the mix.

We've played what limited code we've got to death, and already the promise of another Serious Sam smash is evident. Although the game is now going to be cross-platform, and there's virtually nothing left of the original engine, Croteam has stuck firmly to the ideals it believes makes a good game. And if that means including eagle-women with too much lippy on, then who are we to argue? It may not have quite the same glossy sheen of the new, all-grown-up Doom 3, but in remaining true to the fundamentals of what made first-person shooters fun in the first place, Serious Sam II could well be the surprise hit of the year.

Official Xbox Magazine staff