What's 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.

It is a testament, perhaps, to the enduring success of Serious Sam: The First Encounter that it's still rather agreeable in 2009. It's aged quite well, actually, like the original or a nice bit of Stilton. As Sam's low-tech version isn't without its own charms, it's a game not exactly crying out for a HD version like, say, II was. Croteam should be proud of their original work, which is both a blessing and a curse for their new version.

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Sam's transition takes him from Serious Engine 1 to 3, which means everything's a lot crisper, water looks better and what was shiny before is super shiny now. It's functional. It elicits the most happiness when it just throws you a sack of ammo and a wide open area, maybe with a few perfectly rectangular buildings to use as cover. It's a game best, and often only, played by holding down the left mouse button until everything around you is dead. Its architecture is remedial, its landscape a clear path from A to B and its enemies completely lack any discernable intelligence, their only routine an immediate bee-line in your direction - enemies often gets stuck running against objects blocking their straight-line advances. As a game it's always been a great many things, but serious it is not.

Weapons arrive large and promptly get bigger. It borrows its influences from the school of design where you can do a 180 degree spin in a millisecond and must quickly learn to fire rockets with deadly precision. You can aim anything that's not a shotgun right into the horizon and hit an enemy three miles away with perfect accuracy, which is useful because you'll find yourself having to do it quite a lot. Though there's plenty of close-up shooting, too. And mid-range shooting. There's lots of shooting, basically, and lots and lots of monsters on the screen at any one time. So many, in fact, that you'll often be too busy trying to liberally perforate the inexorable waves with a near-unlimited stream of bullets to often notice the new graphics engine.

Monsters look like snazzy renders of a thirteen-year-old nerd's doodles for his imagined sci-fi universe. There are evil eyeballs with arms and legs - the Gnarr - which run at you, headless suicide bombers that run at you and skeleton things which run at you on all fours. Some of the bigger monsters, like the Arachnoids and green glob throwing Reptiloids, tend go the opposite route and stand completely still. Other highlights are the Bio-Mechanoids, which look like alien versions of Robocop's ED-209 and the charging Werebull, an animal of such considerable momentum that it's more than capable of colliding with you well after you've taken it out with a barrage of handy laser blasts to its face.

It's a great game; it always has been. It sucks you into a kitsch, time-travelling B-movie universe of an ancient Egypt absolutely riddled with futuristic alien nasties. Its wide variety of enemies, and Croteam's uncanny ability to throw mass permutations of them at you in a way that's always entertaining, makes sure it's always a pleasure to plod through the game's seventeen levels. What it lacks in variety it's always made up for in entertainment.

If you've never played Serious Sam before then, after confronting your shame, it's easily worth picking up a copy of this. Hold off a bit and it'll inevitably be featured in a crazy sale, but for the uninitiated it's easily worth the asking price. Grab it with a few mates and you'll even be able to play the maniacal (up to 16 player) co-op mode, where the game spawns a plethora of additional monsters with each additional player. Finding a public co-op game is a harder task: I found the server list horribly unpopulated both before and after launch.

What if you have played the game before, though? The merits of the package are reduced somewhat after realising Croteam have forgotten about the serious Serious Sam players - the ones who have religiously played the game every couple of years since it first came out, and have ferreted around most levels to collect all the secrets - and neglected to offer them anything original for their money. There are no new levels, weapons or enemies, and no bonus features or insightful bits and bobs thrown in. It seems a bit upsetting that, whilst porting over the game to a new engine, Croteam never thought about tinkering with anything. If they weren't going to give us a new mini-campaign, the least they could have done was get rid of the duff bit from the middle of the game where you get attacked by evil frogs for what feels like twelve hours. Nobody likes that bit.

The best they can offer, it seems, is an obligatory set of achievements. They're not even very good.

Serious Sam was a comforting sight in 2001, eschewing the then-modern developments of the genre to provide something refreshingly familiar to anyone who fell in love with gaming in the early nineties. Eight years later, with the modern FPS riddled with faux-military obsessions and regenerating health, the game still feels reassuringly nostalgic. It's just a shame we weren't given a little bit more. With Serious Sam HD, Croteam prove it's possible to remake them just like they used to.

80%

By Martin Gaston