But let's get something straight right off the bat. Serious Sam is not the next incarnation of Half-Life. It is not designed better than No One Lives Forever. It doesn't have the awesome multiplayer component of a game like Unreal Tournament. The engine, while good, has nowhere near the jaw-dropping complexity of Quake 3. What Serious Sam is, in fact, is a fun, fast, cheap game, heavily schooled by Doom and infused with a unique sense of humor.

In Serious Sam, the player takes on the identity of the titular Sam, who is, as the title indicates, very, very serious. He's quite serious about blowing the living beejeezus out of anything that accidentally wanders into his way, be it beheaded shotgun assassins, skeletal cows or the occasional giant lava monster. From the start, you're shooting at masses of enemies, picking up ammo and health powerups and generally looking for the next key/door or button/door combination necessary to move on to the next level. Plan on doing a lot of this, 'cause this is the essence of the game, which is repeated throughout the next 14 levels, until Sam reaches the final climactic boss battle.

This game has seen the return of an unusual phenomenon that we haven't come across since the old Doom days. The player is required to annihilate so many enemies that you actually feel "full" after extended battles. You're done; you've slain enough demons, rocketed enough monsters, gunned down enough bezerkers. In one section of the game, the player must run around an enclosed courtyard while literally 200 demonic frogs rain in from all sides (you know there are 200 of the lil' bastards because Croteam has included a counter for hilarious effect in this section). The resulting action is nothing less than minutes spent circle-strafing and firing off round after round into the deepening mass of helltoads. After eventually finishing off the last of the buggers, you'll need to take a break to rest your eyes and your cramped hand, which has spent 10 minutes clamped around your mouse in a deathclaw grip. Later levels are even more insane. The conclusion of the game has you fighting your way through a virtually Herculean task of slaying that seemingly never ends.

While we dinged Kiss: Psycho Circus for being too Doom-like, the problem with that game was that it simply threw tons of monsters at the player with no real sense of design. Serious Sam does not have that problem. Croteam may not have the greatest level designers -- most levels are hallways that connect to larger rooms or outdoor environments that feed into courtyards, and the game never leaves the Egyptian setting -- they have mastered the art of level flow. They know just where to place their monsters, where to hide triggers, when to relent on the tide of beasties and just when the player is going to run out of ammo, health or patience. After 10 minutes with the game, you'll begin to appreciate the sense of humor Croteam had when whipping this game together. Eventually, you'll come to realize that the full backpack of ammo and the health-up hovering so invitingly in the middle of a big, wide open courtyard are going to spawn a horde of really, really pissed off critters the second you touch 'em. And you won't care. In fact, you'll most likely laugh, ready your best weapon, quick save and charge into the middle of the room. Because that's the sort of mindset that Serious Sam engenders.

Sam's Beheaded Kamikaze is perhaps one of the funniest, scariest enemies we've seen in recent memory. Most of the time, the Kamikazes make themselves known long before they're seen, because the moment they spawn, they begin screaming and running at the player in a straight line, detonating the bombs in their hands as soon as they come within range. The player cannot outrun the Kamikazes, forcing a self-preservation strategy of hunting them down their moment the screams are heard. The rest of the monsters in the game suffer from a disappointing sameness -- skeletal demon, small hopping critter, larger gun- and rocket-toting creatures -- and are lacking the Kamikaze's standout looniness. The same, unfortunately, goes for Sam's arsenal. The only weapon we saw that really spoke of creativity was the cannon, which fires a gigantic cannonball that rolls across the screen, smiting everything in its path.

Had Serious Sam been released in the $35-50 price range, there's no way on God's green Earth that we would give it a Direct Hit. Yet for $20, it shouldn't be missed. Grab this game on the way to the checkstand; you will get every penny's worth out of it.