2005 FPS Serious Sam 2 just got a big update for reasons known only to God

Serious Sam 2 just got a meaty patch from the devs at Croteam featuring UI updates, graphical improvements, changes to the multiplayer, and bugfixes. George W Bush is president, and the subprime mortgage market can only go up, up, up, baby!

Wait, no, sorry. It is in fact 2025, but all those things I said about Serious Sam 2 remain, inexplicably, true. To mark SS2's 20th anniversary, Croteam returned to the game to give the whole thing some new polish and "keep those Serious vibes alive for years to come!"

The changes are many, but the biggest is that Croteam has packed the SS2 Renovation Mod right into the base game. That's "a global cosmetic mod to ensure the most comfortable Serious Sam 2 experience possible", that does things like rework the interface to be closer to the Serious Sam Xbox version, tweak weapon visuals, and make "enemies gib in a much more satisfying way". Which, thank god.

The new update has also split the game's controller and KBAM control menus out into their own separate fiefs, separating the bindings entirely. HUD icons have been redrawn in HD, fonts are better, movies play in full screen, and the default res is now 720p. In essence, Serious Sam 2 is now ready to be launched in 2025.

Which is pretty great, if you ask me. It's always a treat when devs return to their aged back-catalogues to surprise us with an update (unless they just break everything), and this is no different.

Croteam has form for this, after all: SS2 got a 15th anniversary update a mere—hang on, let me do the maths—five years ago. So I guess see you in five years for the 25th anniversary update, which will make the game run well on the HUDs of our military AR headsets in the Water Wars.