When your actual mission begins, you are looking down on your squad of four marines, in control of the lead marine. Switching between squadmates is simple, and issuing commands to your squad takes just a couple keypresses. As with Alpha Black Zero, the fact that the game uses Serious Engine technology isn't apparent at all. The graphics are top-notch, and the bloom lighting looks great, especially when it's below you and to the sides as you're walking across a platform. However, the one aspect of Serious Sam that becomes obvious rather quickly is the large enemy counts. You're swarmed non-stop by alien bugs (think Starship Troopers). My squad did a pretty good job of fending them off, and it was a blast to feel all four squad rifles thundering through my subwoofer as alien after alien went down in a mess of yellow blood.

Another element that was common in between the fighting was the need to unlock closed doors. Instead of having to search around the levels for a key or a code to open the door, you have to hack the security on each door. This is where Negative Space surprised me; instead of some other games such as System Shock 2 where when hacking it's just a random click-fest and luck, Khaeon came up with an interesting way of hacking the doors. Once you walk up to the door, a small panel replaces your map and scrolls lines of numbers. On each line several numbers are highlighted, and you have to key in the highlighted numbers from each line until the door unlocks.