Serious Sam: The Random Encounter Review

You remember Serious Sam, right? He's that throwback to a different age when First Person Shooters required nothing more than big guns, large amounts of enemies and gigantic bosses to cap it all off. He's back now, through a fashion, in indie title Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, which as some of the more astute of you may have picked up from the title, is actually an old-school looking RPG which is made by an indie studio called Vlambee.

As part of the Serious Sam Indie Series, where indie developers have been given free reign on the lisence to make whatever they can come up with, this is quite the shock to Sam vets who maybe expected simply a different way to shoot people from Sam's perspective. Instead you have a very basic RPG with no levelling up and a LOT of random encounters, with the occasional boss battle thrown in for good measure. The thing that makes this little gem stand out is its battle system, which I'll get into in a little bit.

First things first, RPG's are all about the story, right? So what is Sam fighting for? Is he going to save the world? Get the girl? Find an ancient artifact to bring balance between good and evil? Well, I'll let you get the gist of the story through a quote from Sam himself - "I want to shoot Mental in the face." There's your story, ladies and gentlemen, and honestly, would you expect any more?

Throughout your journey you'll meet various like-minded individuals who also want to shoot things in the face that will join you, bolstering your parties numbers and my God will you need it for those battles. Being a Serious Sam title, battles consist of Sam, however many allies he's currently come across and a metric ton of enemies coming towards you. Being an RPG it isn't your typical FPS game, though, no. When you're dragged into a battle, you and your team will be running backwards at full pelt on the right-hand side of the screen, while all manner of series baddies will be haring towards you from the left. While this is going on, every five seconds you can choose a typical RPG-like command, between fight, swap (weapons) and item. Starting off with a rather weak revolver you simply hit the fight command until you win, but as you progress you'll pick up various other Sam staples like the shotgun, which has a changeable radius, a mini-gun which is very powerful but only shoots in a straight line, a grenade launcher which shoots grenades onto a designated circle of the screen, among more. It's the differences between weapons that make the game so fun and hectic, it works brilliantly.

While you're fighting your way through Mental's hordes you'll encounter traditional Sam humour as you'd expect, for example near the beginning of the game there is a locked door guarded by a boss monster, where Sam informs us that he hates puzzles. Roughly 20 seconds later I had picked up the key that was clearly visible on screen the whole time, beat up the boss monster and Sam says "I enjoyed that puzzle." It's typical Sam humour and is persistent throughout the game.

Graphically it is reminiscent of old-school RPG's from the NES era, with small sprites on an overworld map, and changing to the battle screen when required, which has slightly better looking sprites. Nothing astounding but it does add to its overall charm, and fits perfectly with what the developers were going for.

I'm looking forward to see what else this Serious Sam Indie Series brings. It's always refreshing when an indie game comes and is something special. Strangely enough it's even more refreshing when an indie game comes along that takes on an established franchise, as it gives it much needed name recognition. The Random Encounter is worth a go, available from Steam at £3.99 it's not going to rip your wallet apart if you decide to give it a go.