Undertow Review

I just downloaded Undertow from the Xbox Live Arcade yesterday and it actually surprised me a bit. Now, I have never bought an Arcade game before. Spending $10 or $15 for a small game doesn't appeal to me when I could just save that money to get a quality $60 game. But, as you probably know, this game was free (today is the last day to get it free by the way) and I couldn't resist downloading it and trying it out. It is actually a very good little time waster.

Basically, you are this marine group under water and you are fighting these people. That may sound very vague and its probably because the game actually has a story with cut scenes and all but I just skipped those and went to the actual game.

The point of the game is to capture these strategic checkpoints that give you troops before the other team does. It is a lot like Conquest Mode in Star Wars Clone Wars the game. So you start off on one side of the map, while the other team starts out on the other side and you battle to get the two or three checkpoints in between.

There is also a counter of the number of troops you have. If you capture all of the checkpoints the other team starts losing numbers on the counter very fast and when it reaches zero they lose. If you can't capture all of them, no worries, just kill all of the people to get the counter to go to zero.

Another task of the checkpoints is that they are places where you can switch classes. There are four classes in the game: a marine, a marine in this bulky suit, a small ship, and a bigger ship. My personal favorite is the small ship because the weapons are good and it isn't slow as hell like the big one, but I guess people could like other ones.

I am playing on normal mode (there is easy, normal, and hard) and I have to say the game gets pretty difficult. The last level on the first campaign (yes, there's more than one, but each are pretty bite-sized) took me about 4 tries before I beat it.

So, all in all, its a pretty decent game. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than most of the classic crap that usually comes out on the Live Arcade.