Getting a LAN co-op game going in Serious Sam II was a snap; in fact, the hardest part was getting the 4-CD install completed on all our test machines. There's an entire screen of settings available to customize a co-op game, from difficulty level to number of lives per player to the relative strength of the enemies as more players join the game. There's even an "infinite ammo" option, which, as we found out, arguably makes things too easy in co-op play, allowing us to rely on more powerful weapons like the rocket launcher or the Claudovic exploding parrot, which carries a bomb to the nearest enemy and does a heap of damage.

Co-op play functioned much as it did in the previous Serious Sam games: the entire group just destroys everything in sight as fast as it arrives, and if you die, you simply respawn and catch up to the rest of the group (just listen for stuff exploding). Once one player reaches the end of the level, the next level loads for everyone, so if there's a case where you get completely lost (which isn't impossible to do on the larger levels), you'll automatically catch back up at the start of the next level.

Taking out enemy choppers is always easier with a few friends ... and an exploding parrot.

Performance wasn't much of an issue during our testing, although we were using mostly high-end machines. The weakest was a BioStar mini-PC running with a 3.0GHz CPU and a GeForce 6600GT, and, at a resolution of 1024x768, only occasionally stuttered, despite the ridiculous amount of action on the screen. On a Dell XPS 500 with a 3.4 GHz CPU and a GeForce 7800 GTX running at 1920x1200 and 2X antialiasing, everything was silky smooth no matter what was happening, and even our newly-built Shuttle (see our article last week) barely broke a sweat through our playtesting. (There's native widecreen support, if you're interested in such things.)

About the only downside to the few hours testing Serious Sam II was that we couldn't go longer -- we wrapped things up during the third episode, and even though there were a few fun boss fights, we can't help but think there are much, much bigger enemies to come. We'll be back to tell you how it all turns out with our full Serious Sam II review in a few days.