First Look: Serious Sam Double D

There's a lovely promotional initiative taking place for Serious Sam 3. Quintin brought news of it back in March. A few indie developers, whose games Devolver and Croteam enjoy, have been asked to make a game in their own style set in the Serious Sam universe. I've had a chance to see one of them running - Serious Sam Double D from Mommy's Best Games. Vuvuzelators, chimp amputees and gun stacking within.

You may have encountered Mommy's Best before, if you've encountered the extremely popular XBLA hit, Weapon Of Choice. Much like it, Double D is a hand-painted, side-scrolling platformer that focuses on the use of weapons. Except much more immature.

Really embracing the vibe of the mother series, Double D offers large waves of familiar enemies, along with some of MBG's own creations. Including... the Femikaze. The Kamikaze, as we all know, is a headless man, naked from the waist up, with a bomb in each hand. The Femikaze is exactly the same, except she holds her bombs over her chest to protect her modesty.

So what you've got here is side-scrolling action, but with one key new element. Gun stacking. In most games when you pick up the same weapon a second time, you merely get the ammo. Not here. Here you can choose to stack that gun on top of the previous one. And then maybe add a machine gun. And a shotgun. Perhaps a grenade launcher. And then you could put a chainsaw on top. Until Sam is running along with up to six weapons idiotically balanced on top of one another in a giant pile.

If anyone needs more than that to be interested, then there's something wrong with you. But fortunately the game will also feature dinosaurs. And chimputees. Chimpanzees who have had both their arms and legs amputated, and replaced with a grenade launcher, battle axe, and jetpacks for legs. They are understandably cross about this.

And you can ride the dinosaurs.

And there are evil pancakes.

Watching all this be presented to me on creator Nathan Fouts' laptop was a strange experience. A calm, softly spoken man, gently introducing evil sentient pancakes armed with vuvuzelas, is an odd time indeed. They are of course called Vuvuzelators. And they have sharp teeth.

It looks tremendous fun, a short, sweet indie game of ridiculous violence and weaponry, and some impressively bad-taste enemies. We should find out in the next couple of months.