Review: "Serious Sam: The Random Encounter"

Friends, Shoot Him In the Face

review for Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (PC), 1 player action/RPG, out now

Serious Sam 3: BFE is out right now. It's Croteam's love letter to first-person shooting, an excellent game with a bevy of multiplayer options and extraordinary polish and attention to detail. The gameplay is classic Serious Sam; wide open spaces filled with relentless enemies, a non-linear ludo-narrative, the likes of which naturally come about when you dump the player in with the AI and let the destruction unfold without the aid of gratuitous set-piece cutscenes. And it's a lot of fun. Despite all this, there's are more interesting Serious Sam titles, and they all came out in 2011.

The Serious Sam Indie Series is what it is. Part marketing experiment, part unprecedented opportunity for indie developers to play around with the established formula of a well-known franchise, it's essentially publisher Devolver Digital throwing Serious Sam's assets and rights the way of a couple of independent studios with the simple instruction of, "do what you will". From the Serious Sam model of first-person shooting, the three titles made somehow included a gun-stacking 2D shooter, a survival-platformer for iPad, and... a Japanese-style, turn-based RPG. It's that RPG that we're going to look at now. It's called The Random Encounter. And you see what they did there, indeed.