We try to bring you every day a fresh review and on Thursday we bring you a review of Croteams' latest (classic) shooter, in HD for Xbox Live Arcade.

The name is "Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD". Anybody who played shooters back in the nineties will definitely remember this classic on PC CDROM.

Now, the developer has polished it up for HD and released it onto the XBL service.

Is it seriously good?

Here's a snip:

Serious Sam is a very simple shooter, that even at the time, looked to go back to the roots of the genre. The basic controls are just move, shoot, aim and jump. The levels are mostly linear, but there are loads of secrets to find.

 

However, the pretence of an open structure doesn’t do the game any favours in the modern world- it’s very difficult at some points to pathfind, and impossible to know at other points you are locked in certain areas until you kill a certain number of enemies.