Serious Sam HD The First Encounter

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter is the HD remake of the 2001 original — GameSpot's Game of the Year and one of the defining maximalist arena shooters of its decade. The setup is unchanged from the source material: Sam 'Serious' Stone has been sent back through time to ancient Egypt to battle Notorious Mental and the Sirian army, and the gameplay loop is exactly what that summary suggests.

The core appeal is the sheer density of enemies on screen. Charging Sirian Werebulls, screaming Headless Kamikazes, multi-story Ugh-Zans — the bestiary is famous in shooter circles for the way it stacks dozens of distinct enemy types into the same arena simultaneously and asks you to manage all of them at once. The remake redesigns every creature spectacularly without changing the moveset, so encounters play the way old fans remember while looking like a modern game.

The arsenal is the other half. Demon-stopping revolvers, lead-spewing miniguns, monstrous cannons — when you absolutely, positively have to kill every enemy in sight, the toolkit fits the job. Each weapon has a specific role in crowd control, and the run-and-gun rhythm depends on swapping between them at exactly the right moments.

The HD upgrade runs on the Serious Engine 3, with redesigned environments, high-resolution visuals and lush atmospheric work that turn the original's expansive Egyptian backdrops into one of the most striking shooter settings of its era. Fifteen levels make up the campaign, and Co-Op mode supports up to sixteen players running the campaign together — the kind of party-shooter chaos that the original game more or less invented. Steam Cloud handles profile saves.