While I have an extensive collection of Serious Sam games on Steam, Serious Sam Double D eluded me when it was released in 2011 on PC. Now, though, we have Serious Sam Double D XXL on Xbox Live, and I have been given the opportunity to correct my mistake.
And what a mistake it was.
If you were wondering if such a thing as a 2D recreation of the Serious Sam experience could ever work, Double D XXL is proof that it absolutely can. It all starts with presentation, and Sam himself is as dumb and hilarious as he always has been, ready to tear through waves of evil aliens because it needs to be done, or maybe just because.
Too, Double D give us a look at the equally dumb and hilarious villain, a general with a fucked-up mouth who likes to give speeches to headless kamikazes. The results are amazing. He can harp all he wants about how the kamikazes should throw their bombs, but at the end of the day they only know how to do one thing: blow themselves up.
But Double D XXL is all about killing, and killing is a thing is does very well. You might have heard that this game offers a feature called gun stacking, and what that means is you can pile up to six different weapons on top of each and fire them all at the same time. You might want four shotguns and two assault rifles, and you can certainly do that if you want. But I like more variety than that, and Double D XXL offers it. My stack has a the default weapon (with unlimited ammo) shotgun, tommy gun that allows me to glide while firing, a tommy gun which has bullets that bounce off the environment, a grenade launcher that shoots carnivorous beetles and a rocket launcher. And boy do I deal death quite efficiently with that setup. One can not oversell the greatness of this gun-stacking idea. It is pure genius. Who’s never wanted to shoot six guns at the same time?
All those weapons stacked up really come in handy when I travel back to the Jurassic period (Sam thinks we’re going to Jurassic Park) and have to face down giant dinosaurs. Trixie told me I could leave them alone and they wouldn’t attack me, but where’s the fun in that? Sam agrees with me, and so we couldn’t resist attacking every living thing we saw.
Thankfully, most of those living things were out to kill us, and there is a delightful variety in things that want to kill us. There are typical Serious Sam baddies like the kamikazes and Gnaars, but there are also new ones like the flying kittens that spew fire and stacks of pancakes that explode when you shoot them.
And there are a whole lot of all those bad guys, and it certainly is enough to satisfy fans of Croteam’s series. You will go down at points, but you will go down shooting like crazy, and you will not be sad that you have to shoot all those things all over again. The parts that are most likely to kill you are the most fun.
Sometimes they’ll throw so many bad guys at you at once that their bodies will pile up, creating the most awesome mountain of dead creatures you’ve ever seen. that would be thrilling even of it weren’t incredibly useful at times. But it can be useful, and so it is the utmost of thrilling.
You’ll be happy to know that you can do all this in co-op as well, and anybody who has played a Serious Sam game in a cooperative mode knows that when shit really gets started. It’s not an eight-player game of BFE, but two-player Double D is quite an experience nonetheless.
All of the above adds up to Double D XXL being a true successor to the Serious Sam mantle, and it’s a good introduction to the series for those who want to see what kind of action a Serious Sam game packs in for you. In short, it is fast and furious, and I would only ever use those terms together to describe something truly awesome. Serious Sam Double D XXL is a must-buy.
We live in a world in which video games are a place to shoot stuff. I often wish that things would change and we would gravitate away from endless virtual killing, but this is where we are, and we might as well enjoy it while it’s here. Double D XXL is full of murderous enjoyment, and if we’re going to glorify killing, we might as well glorify killing with six guns at once.
The Verdict
5 out of 5
