Serious Sam: The Random Encounter Review: Seriously Scrambled

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is the kind of game that you enjoy while not really understanding why you’re enjoying it. It’s a Dude Where’s My Car title, where there’s something compelling and entertaining, but pinpointing those qualities is difficult and explaining them is even harder. At least initially.

At a base level, TRE offers a truly unique gaming experience with a refreshing, if completely bizarre and atypical, approach to “standard” RPG formatting, a profound sense of manic creativity that permeates the game design through and through, and pitch-perfect humor. It’s different in a good way…mostly.

While the story is nothing to really write about (Mental is attacking again, and Sam has to shoot things to stop him), and the two additional characters are basically just extra firepower and offer little in the way of character development, the game still tends to win you over on account of the little throwaway jokes and puns. For example, there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it joke involving a post-swim afro. The notion of puzzles in a game about shooting things is ridiculed constantly and mercilessly, almost to the point where I was wondering if it was all still in good fun. Even the puzzles themselves are ultimately solved by “shooting things.” The game consistently breaks the fourth wall but never feels too awkward when doing so, mostly due to its tongue being planted firmly in cheek the entire time. TRE’s action sequences lampoon the RPG genre, and its RPG elements lampoon the action genre. It’s a strange combination, but it absolutely excels in many ways. It kept me grinning almost the entire way through at least…a difficult feat, to be sure, given that I’m a hardened, cynical, antisocial bastard.

But unfortunately, as frequently as the game excels, it falls victim to its own hybrid design; TRE is built as an almost Final Fantasy-style RPG with a heavier emphasis on action. Its battle system is technically turn-based, wave-based, AND real-time. On top of all of that, all characters on the battlefield are in constant motion; the enemies are running at you, and your team is running backwards. It’s like a Final Fantasy Back-Attack gone awry. This is a difficult combination to successfully implement in any game, so credit to Vlambeer for biting off a huge chunk and running with it as well as they did—it is difficult to run and chew at the same time, right? But the battle system does suffer from trying to do too much at once.

At the start of each fight, and every 5 seconds thereafter, the game will pause so you can issue commands to your team. It’s a turn-based RPG and it feels comfortably familiar here.

Attack mostly works as you’d expect, but TRE adds a slight wrinkle to the process: each weapon has its own firing rate/pattern/trajectory, so you can’t just hit A (so to speak) and expect to win.

In order to maximize weapon efficiency, you need to learn what your weapons do and how to best adjust your aim. The minigun takes a second to spin up but will rip through everything in its line of fire. The shotgun is strictly kept for close encounters and little else. The cannon will wipe out everything in its path provided you give it a turn to charge up. You need the firepower, too, because survival in TRE greatly depends upon your ability to correctly identify, target, and eliminate high-danger enemies, much like the traditional Serious Sam games.

Swap allows your character to take a second and switch to a different weapon. It would be more useful if more of the weapons were more effective, I think. Throughout the game, the weapons I primarily relied upon were the rocket launcher, the minigun, the shotgun, and the cannon. I never had an urge or reason to use anything else. Plus, when each wave is only five seconds long, and your character needs to use approximately a whole second to swap weapons, you use the command less and less as you progress. Once you settle on a weapon combination, you have little reason to use anything else because nothing else really comes close.

Item most of the items you use are standard Serious Sam power-ups: armor-ups, speed-ups, quad damage, and so on. The most important items are Serious Speed, Serious Damage, and Serious Bomb. Serious Speed puts distance between you and the mobs, acting as a sort of damage reducer…very useful. Serious Damage boosts your damage output and has tremendous synergy with the minigun. Serious Bomb is one of those Too Awesome To Use items that you never want to use on regular enemies, but eventually come to realize some of the mobs later in the game absolutely require you to go nuclear, so to speak.

When you’re finished with the turn-based phase, the wave portion begins. This is where the combat actually occurs, and where TRE differentiates itself from the standard RPG. Normally, each character would take their turn in something that resembles an organized structure (unless the game is Shining Force 1 on Sega Genesis).

Serious Sam turns that notion on its head, preferring that everything happen in one chaotic five-second period of utter lunacy. Your team executes your commands; the enemy mobs swarm and try to completely overwhelm your defenses. The trouble is that there really isn’t any way to avoid damage because the game throws A LOT at you, and you will frequently see almost the entire screen filled with laser blasts and fireballs. So even though you’re able to move your characters vertically during these five-second wave phases, it ultimately doesn’t matter because you WILL die.

And I think that’s the underlying issue with TRE. Its real-time combat does not successfully mesh with its RPG format. In a proper RPG, you would have ways to mitigate damage, whether through armor modifications, stat boosts, evasion skills, and so on. Here, however, damage mitigation is either luck that you were able to zip in between enemy fire, using Serious Speed, or being able to kill the high-danger enemies faster than they can kill you. Of course, the best defense is going to be a good offense, but unfortunately your offensive options are limited.

The weapons are diverse, yes, but some of them are useless. I was extremely underwhelmed by the revolver, though I was probably expecting something like
Resident Evil 4′s Handcannon. Then again, if a revolver is going to be that slow and only hit one enemy at a time, it should be a magnum bigger than your head, and it should be a one-hit-kill. Borderlands and Resident Evil hold true to this tenet, and The Random Encounter would have benefited greatly by doing the same.

The laser rifle is marginally effective at pushing back the mobs, but when all is said and done, it has no stopping power and raises an interesting philosophical conundrum:

If a dangerous enemy is further away, is it less deadly?

In TRE, the answer is no. The majority of the enemies have ranged attacks, and most of them are able to hit you from off-screen, so instead of focusing on pushing them “out of range,” it’s best to just outright kill them. Otherwise you’ll take more damage with nothing to really show for it.

Ultimately, I found the optimal mob-killing weapon combination to be the shotgun, the minigun, and the cannon. Since the shotgun is highly situational, I devoted Sam to item-usage. The minigun was used to lay down constant firepower. The cannon was able to clear out large rows of enemies every other turn, which worked rather well in terms of crowd control. Overall, the combination worked and I was able to complete the game with it.

Or at least, I would have been able to complete the game with that combination if I were sure that I had actually completed it.  I encountered a rather significant bug right at the final boss fight, where a few seconds into its explosion, the game just hung. Eventually it kicked over to what I assumed to be a victory screen, only to hang again, and I had to force-close through Task Manager. Once I restarted it, Endless Mode had unlocked, but when I loaded it, I had all three characters available when the map screen implied otherwise. Once the first random battle began, the game glitched and sent me back to the hanging final boss explosion, and after I force-closed again, Endless Mode  was just fine. Campaign mode wasn’t so lucky, though. The “Continue Campaign” slot shows only two characters and still loads the infinitely-hanging final boss explosion. It’s a very peculiar bug, to be sure.

When all is said and done, all things considered, I do recommend playing The Random Encounter. It has issues, both structurally and technically, and some of its mechanics lack polish, but the fundamental experience is an extraordinarily positive one. The humor, writing, and jokes are on-point, including a great running gag about puzzles and shooting things. The battle system, while frustrating at times, consistently challenges you, and once the game clicks, it all does come together in a decently pleasing way. However, it’s still the kind of game that requires at least two playthroughs: one to learn the game, and the second to hone and refine the strategies you create on the first.

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Serious Sam: The Random Encounter was provided for review by Vlambeer. It is available for $4.99 on Steam. 

By Alex Esten at December 1, 2011.