Holy crap, they're making Serious Sam: The Third Encounter

It took almost 25 years to happen, but Serious Sam: The Third Encounter is finally, actually happening. Croteam and Devolver Digital revealed today that a proper new game in the Serious Sam series is now in the early stages of development.

Serious Sam: The Third Encounter will actually be the seventh mainline game in the series, thanks to its oddball naming scheme and twisted timeline. Here's how the whole thing breaks down:

• Serious Sam: The First Encounter (2001)
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (2002)
• Serious Sam 2 (2005)
• Serious Sam 3: BFE (2011)
• Serious Sam 4 (2020)
• Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem (2022)

I won't pretend to understand this messy continuity, except that each game is sort of a chapter in the story of Serious Sam, which honestly isn't so much a 'story' as it is an excuse to shoot friggin' huge numbers of guys and make the occasional phone call to an all-conquering intergalactic menace named Mental.

That said, Croteam wants everyone to know that The Third Encounter picks up where The Second Encounter left off, so I hope you were paying attention to how it wrapped up 24 years ago: "Not a side story. A true continuation. This time Sam is going to strike Mental's Horde at its heart, and he’s deadly serious about it."

What matters, though, is that this is seriously Serious Sam: "The only thing standing between you and thousands of enemies is your weapon, and the only thing that matters is who pulls the trigger first." That's what I'm here for, baby.

I can't help wondering if that emphasis on old school Sam doesn't arise at least in part from Serious Sam: Shatterverse, the recently-released co-op roguelite shooter developed by Behaviour Interactive. I played some of it in pre-release and quite frankly, it wasn't very good. (Yes, yes, I was wrong. It happens.) Bugs were a serious issue at launch but the underlying gameplay is a bigger problem: levels are small and constrained, enemy numbers are underwhelming, and the weapons, limited by the game's progression system, are just boring.

Serious Sam 4 didn't really knock my socks off either, to be honest (I never got over them dropping the Planet Badass subtitle), so I'm really looking forward to getting back to the old ways with a new game—one that's just me, a bunch of stupid guns, and zillions of dudes to point them at, as God intended.

Ah, but it's going to be a while before I get to pull that Looney Tunes-style cannon out of my pocket and blast giant lizardmen into sticky bits with it: Croteam noted, with emphasis, that Serious Sam: The Third Encounter is in "early development," so don't expect it to show up anytime soon.