Underground (iPhone) Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

This is why we don't have 24 hour tubes.

Underground is one of the latest much hyped games coming from the Chillingo publishing stable. It comes with another weird plot (I'm saying that more and more with these iPhone games). After a hard day's work/partying your trip home takes a bizarre twist and you are embroiled into a horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up set on the subway.    

Thankfully the days of graffiti covered trains are fading, at least in London, but Underground is partly an homage to the Equalizer NYC days of the 80's. Graffiti is everywhere and in fact your flying craft is a spray can that has transformed into a ship. The enemy come in all forms of bizarre sprites that seem straight out of the Ghost Train at your local fun fair. I must be getting old as the whole premise baffles me but the action is very good.

Underground comes with both tilt and touch control options although even tilt uses a little bit of touch. With the pure touch controls you can touch and drag your ship around the screen and obviously with tilt controls you just tilt. Your ship is on autofire and bullets stream out of the front. If you want (and you kinda have to in later levels) you can touch the screen to angle your shots. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of tilt based games but having to use the pure touch system does block your view with thumbs. The tilt system does work well and I think gives you better acceleration when in a tight spot. Power ups are available in the form of different nozzle caps but there are no health packs - one hit and it's a life lost. The game does come with infinite continues but forces you to restart the level. The game is pretty tough but the enemies do repeat their attacks so you can learn their paths and adjust accordingly.

For all its bizarreness, the game does succeed. Some of the animation between levels is very impressive and look out for your character's ghostly reflection.