You are Sam "Serious” Stone a legend in his time, due to his extreme bravery in battle. As attempts to defend the solar system fail the planet Earth is coming under direct attack, and humankind stares into the face of its own annihilation.

World leaders turn to their only hope, an ancient artefact called the "Time-Lock” that can teleport a single person back in time. The choice of whom to send is obvious...

You are the only hope for humankind. Return to the past and change it by exterminating the evil forces determined to end humanity.

Not happy with the number of baddies that all the current shooters throw at you? Feeling cramped running through corridor to corridor? Well you're in luck, sporting an amazing graphic and terrain engine, Serious Sam puts you in wide open levels against dozens and dozens of baddies at any given moment.

Levels from The First and Second Encounter Serious Sam games were rearranged to make for one fluid game, making it a total of 36 single player levels in 5 episodes. Don't be fooled, this is one long game that will take you a while to get through! From the first level through to the end, Serious Sam is pure arcade action that is loads of fun.

There's not much story to Serious Sam, basically a bunch of Aliens want to wipe out Earth and Sam has something against that, so it's your job to make sure that it doesn't happen!

Progress from level to level, kill the alien scum and move on. It's kind of hard to elaborate more as there isn't much more than that in Serious Sam to do!

The weapons are mostly pretty good, you pick up 6 shooter revolvers which you can wield two of at once for some John Woo style action, there's also shotgun, pump action and double barrel, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, flame thrower and everyone's favourite, the chainsaw is included! There's a few more weapons but I don't want to give away all the surprises. You'll probably, like me, find a few that you like the most and stick with them for most of the game.

From time to time you'll come across puzzles, but they won't keep you stumped for long, overall it's an action packed romp from start to finish with nothing to get in your way except the hordes of baddies.

The controls are simple to use, move and look with the two analogue sticks, jump with the L trigger, shoot with the R trigger and switch weapons with the B button. There's also an auto aim mode to help you out and a nice new interface and HUD to make life easier for you. Basically everything from the PC version of Serious Sam has been enhanced and streamlined to make the Xbox version the best version yet!

Everything in Serious Sam looks pretty good. The levels are vast and varied and the outdoor levels look great with trees, water, grass and some good texture work. Everything is brightly coloured giving it all a cartoon style that really suits this game.

The baddies all look good and their animations are nice and fluid. The massive bulls that run at you move very fast and have to be dodged at the last minute. Some of the boss aliens are gigantic as well and tower over you, I haven't seen baddies this big in a game ever! Not once with all the baddies on screen and explosions going off all over the place did I see the game take one hit in the frame rate department, everything moves lightning fast and the action is incredible. The Xbox version also sports some cool cut scenes created especially for this version.

The sound in Serious Sam isn't too bad, the guns all sound good, explosions have a bit of oomph to them and Sam's wisecracks are pretty cool too. The alien sounds are all pretty good, from the scream of the beheaded kamikazes as they blindly run at you, to the hoof noises of the Kleer Skeletons the audio does the job well.

Serious Sam supports split screen and system link death match modes, but the most fun we had was with the Co-operative mode. Playing through Serious Sam in co-op mode was incredible fun and would be almost worthy of the admission price alone!

We had some good death match sessions with Serious Sam and it was loads of fun, the only thing we found was that in two player mode, the screen doesn't fill the whole width of the television but kind of sits in the middle and you end up with a black bar down the left and right hand side of the screen. According to Take Two though this is to keep it fair in 3 player death match action as everyone will have the same size screen to look at, but in two player, there's no real need for it and to be honest it was a bit frustrating.

Overall though, Serious Sam sports some excellent multiplayer action and is worthy of your gaming time.