$9.99Serious Sam II Hordes, jokes and huge guns
Serious Sam II sends Sam Stone across jungles, swamps, frozen tundra and futuristic cities to shoot his way through time-travelling hordes and take down Mental. Forty-plus colorful levels, bomb-toting clowns, rideable animals and a trigger that never needs a break. Big guns, bigger crowds, and jokes all the way down.
Is Serious Sam II worth it?
Serious Sam II is worth it if…
- you want a shooter where the only real strategy is choosing which gun to point at which crowd
- you like games that are loud, colorful and openly ridiculous
- you have friends who would happily join a 16-player horde-clearing session
- you miss the arcade shooters of the early 2000s and want one that still plays well
- you would rather react fast than plan slow
Screenshots
Hold the trigger, clear the screen
This is an arcade shooter in the purest sense: enemies pour in from every angle, and your job is to keep moving and keep firing until the screen is empty. You carry the whole arsenal at once, shotgun to cannon, so the real decision is which gun fits which crowd. The alternative fire adds a new trick: lob a grenade into an oncoming pack of monsters and watch the whole group go up. Ammo is plentiful but has to be picked up, and some fights deliberately overload you until all you can do is react. It is fast, loud and relentless, and it never asks you to stop and think.
Clowns, rhinos and zombie stockbrokers
The enemy roster is where the comedy lives. Forty-five outrageous creatures and seven bosses stand between Sam and Mental, from windup rhinos to the iconic beheaded kamikazes, and each one asks for a different answer. The tone is bright and cartoonish, closer to a Saturday morning fever dream than a grim war, and Sam keeps up a running commentary between fights. The humor is corny on purpose, and it divides longtime fans of the series' grimmer earlier games, but it is baked into the structure rather than sprinkled on top. If you want a shooter that refuses to take itself seriously, this one commits completely.
Sixteen gunslingers, one horde
Everything that makes the campaign fun gets louder with friends. Online co-op takes up to 16 players through 42 levels of mayhem, which turns an already chaotic horde shooter into a full-blown group activity: join a lobby, pick your moment, and annihilate everything that moves together. Prefer competition? Deathmatch lets you drop the gauntlet and face off against each other instead. Sessions are easy to set up and hard to keep orderly, in the best way. When a wave of beheaded kamikazes converges on four friends at once, somebody is going to laugh instead of shooting, and that somebody is about to learn something.
Can you play it solo?
Can you play it solo?
Yes, the whole campaign works as a singleplayer adventure. You battle through more than 40 levels across seven environments, with native tribes sometimes fighting alongside you for a taste of that co-op feeling on your own. The co-op and deathmatch modes are where the biggest chaos happens, but plenty of people finish the story alone and have a great time doing it.
How long does the campaign take?
A full run of the story takes roughly 10 to 15 hours depending on difficulty, so it fits neatly into a few evenings. Higher difficulty settings stretch that out considerably, and the game is built for replaying: secrets to find, weapons to try in new combinations, and a difficulty setting named Serious for a reason.
Is it hard?
It can be. The game is tagged difficult, and on higher settings the hordes stop being funny and start being a genuine test of reflexes. On normal difficulty the pace is frantic but fair, with generous ammo and health pickups keeping you in the fight. The challenge scales to how much punishment you want.
Does it still hold up today?
Gameplay-wise, yes. The core loop of moving, shooting and surviving overwhelming crowds is as satisfying now as it was at release, and the bright cartoon look has aged better than the gritty shooters of its era. The story and some of the humor are very much products of the mid-2000s, so enjoy them as period pieces rather than timeless writing.
