Underground

Underground is a side-scrolling shooter that takes place on the side of a subway train. But wait, it gets weirder, instead of fighting against typical aircraft or aliens, you’ll be shooting at flying graffiti. I knew sniffing glue as a kid would come back to haunt me…

Flying along the side of a subway train you’ll navigate your craft passed various graffiti obstacles and shoot down any moving graffiti art. Underground includes 60 different enemies, ranging from jumping demonic bunnies to floating monkey heads.

Your ship can be destroyed by crashing into graffiti obstacles or enemies. Each enemy has their own predictable flight path, making them relatively easy to dodge. Enemies can also fire upon your ship. The spray pattern for shots can vary from spirals to a circular explosion of pellets. None of the enemies alone pose much of a threat, but if you fail to keep their numbers low you could find yourself cornered.

Enemies can come at you from any angle so it’s best to position your ship near the center of the screen to give you adequate time to react to incoming enemies.

There are two control options, tilt and touch. In tilt mode, the accelerometer is used to maneuver your ship and touchscreen can be used to shoot at different directions. In touch mode, the ship will move relative to your touchscreen swipes. Placing a second finger on the touchscreen will control where your shots go.

I personally preferred the default control scheme, tilt mode. In this mode I only needed to use one finger on the touchscreen in rare chases when I’d need to fire shots at odd angles, but in touchscreen mode, it was difficult to use one finger to navigate the ship and the other to aim my shots, my fingers would cover up lots of the action on the screen.

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