Serious Sam - Next Encounter

Croteam didn't make this one. Climax Solent did, working from the Serious Engine but building something aimed squarely at a console audience, and the first sign of that is the setting. No endless Egyptian sand. Instead a time-travel conceit that runs Sam through Roman aqueducts and coliseums, then Atlantis, then a feudal China of pagodas and bamboo. The architecture changes often enough that the 2004 release never looks like the PC games it descends from.

What survives intact is the arithmetic. Enemies arrive in numbers that make cover pointless, so you circle-strafe wide arcs around open arenas and keep the crosshair swinging. The kamikaze headless bombers still scream before they appear, which remains one of the smartest audio cues in any shooter, because it tells you to turn around without telling you where to look. Weapon progression is generous and quick: sidearms give way to a minigun and a rocket launcher well before the halfway point, and the game is honest about preferring spectacle to scarcity.

The PS2 version leans on split-screen. Four players locally, co-op through the campaign or against each other, and this is where the design justifies itself. Serious Sam's crowd combat was always closer to a score-attack arcade cabinet than to a military shooter, and putting three friends on the same couch makes that explicit. Frame rate suffers when the screen fills, which it constantly does, but the chaos absorbs the stutter better than a slower game would.

Its weaknesses are the ones you'd expect from a licensed engine handed to a second studio on a console schedule. Level geometry repeats, the secret areas are less inventive than the originals', and the humour is thinner — fewer jokes, and the ones that land do so by volume rather than wit. Control with a dual analogue pad never fully solves the problem of tracking fast horizontal swarms, and the auto-aim assist papers over it rather than fixing it.

Still, there is something clarifying about a shooter from this era that refuses to slow down for a cutscene or a stealth section. It asks you to hold a position, read a crowd, and keep moving, and it asks that for five or six hours without pretending to be anything more. Played now with three other people in the room, the compromises stop mattering around the time the second wave of bombers crests the hill.