Review by: Jason McMaster

Serious Sam is an over-the-top old school first person shooter developed by Croteam. There’s a new chapter in the Sam series coming down the pipe, but in the meantime, we have Serious Sam DD, or Double D. DD is a side-scrolling shooter that packs a lot of screaming enemies and guns into a 2D world with that tongue-in-cheek Croteam feel.

The entire experience is designed to make you feel like you could look behind the set and see the wires and stands holding up the pieces. The graphics are reminiscent of paper dolls and have the feel of moving construction paper. Of course, the game offers remakes of many of the Serious Sam bad guys as well, in stunning 2D, as a few new ones for you to dispatch with your stack of weapons.

Note that I said “stack of weapons” and not “weapons” or “bunch of weapons.” The reasoning behind this is that you can attach weapons to each other in Double D. After all this time, the world has caught up to man’s desire to make an angrier weapon by attaching one weapon to another. Want to kill close range as well as long range? No problem! Attach a shotgun to your tommy gun and you got yourself twice the killing power, up close and far away.

So, Double D has side scrolling Serious Sam, tons of weapons and explosions, headless enemies trying to beat you to death. What’s not to like? The tedium.

While Double D is wacky, funny and action-packed, it doesn’t exactly offer much gameplay variety. You will be running, left to right, and shooting a lot. So much, in fact, that it’s easy to find yourself getting tired of killing wave after wave of headless enemies (now available in topless female model), stacked weapons or no, because that’s all the game really does. Does this make it bad? No, but that’s the downfall of side-scrollers like DD and Metal Slug – they do one thing and they do it well.

Monotony complaints aside, Serious Sam Double D’s wacky world, crazy weapons, oddball humor and entertaining environments will keep you chuckin’ and duckin’ through time with Sam. Well, at least until the shine wears off.