Chillingo is back again, publishing an interesting take on your standard side scrolling shoot-em-up. Underground (link takes you to the App Store) is a shooter steeped in graffiti and tagging culture. Everything from the location in the subway system, the sound effects, the soundtrack and enemies all scream tagging. Its interesting to say the least, and a welcome change from the normal scenario of alien invaders or overgrown bugs. You can almost smell the spray paint.
Underground‘s story is a little surreal to say the least. You learn that you are playing the part of an up and coming graffiti artist looking to right a wrong. The story, slim as it might be is told to you while you wait at the “stops” between levels. At first I thought the text was just random garbage while the levels load, but I was quickly drawn in by the craziness and wanted to see where the end of the story would take me. If felt strange to care about the story in a shooter, heck it felt strange for there to be a story in a shooter at all.
You control your ship by tilting your iDevice up and down. Shooting is automatic, but you can aim your shots by touching where you would like them to go. Thankfully this isn’t needed in all levels, as I always hate obstructing the view of the screen with my big mitts.
While each level is essentially the same, your ship flies over subway cars avoiding the graffiti on the cars like the plague as they mean instant death, the combination of the trippy soundtrack, enemy types and style of the on-car graffiti keep things somewhat fresh.
Throughout the game you battle small graffiti tags that will try to fly into or shoot at you. The enemies themselves are varied in design, but all have the chunky style tagging is known for. You’ll take on smiley faces, peace signs, robot dogs, rocket propelled chickens… yeah things get bizarre. As the levels progress the enemies will start taking more damage before exploding into a burst of paint, but their flying pattens will stay the same. It seems like there are really only a couple true enemy types that are re-skinned as the levels progress.
Due to the way that enemies appear from all sides, death will come quickly if you aren’t careful. In the end this doesn’t turn out to be a huge deal as you will immediately reappear to shoot some more. You’ll even retain the power-up you had before your death when you reappear with the trade-off of the inability to pick up anything new until your respawn invincibility wears off. Should you happen to lose all of your lives in a level you can simply “continue trip” and start at the beginning of the level, in what amounts to the most honest use of text in a game. Trip indeed.
I was disappointed to see the lack of any form of multiplayer modes. The single player campaign will take you a few hours at best, and even with multiple play throughs on harder difficulties the fun will soon be over. The addition of an online leaderboard or social network package of some form like OpenFeint would have helped with the bragging of your hit scores. Competition can keep people coming back to a game long after beating it the first time. Hopefully something like this will be added in a future release.
Underground is a fun little shooter, at $3.99 at the time of this writing it may be a little steep for some. Though if you are hungry for a challenging and unique shooter on the App Store, you’ve found your game. Sadly the repetitive level designs and lack of any multiplayer modes kept this from being a must have game in my book.
[rating:3/5]
We reviewed Underground version 1.0, and it was priced at $3.99 when this review was written.
