Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Undertow (XBLA)

[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]Awhile back, Microsoft decided to give away Undertow for free, because they were sitting on hundreds of gigs of unsold Undertow and it was clogging up their mainframe and no one at Microsoft was getting their e-mail. That's how I ended up with my copy, I wouldn't want you to think I spent <s>actual cash money</s> Microsoft Monopoly Money on fucking Undertow. Read on to find out if I liked it or, much more likely, didn't. Undertow was last year's second-hottest Unreal Engine 3-based undersea shooter, which would be pretty damning in and of itself if BioShock wasn't Spike TV Game of the Year. There's no shame in being worse than BioShock, right? Well, that depends on how much worse you are - just a little bit worse, or a medium amount worse, or so much worse that not even the idiots who buy new Gamer Pics would waste their fake money on you. Unlike BioShock, Undertow is played entirely on a 2D plane. You control a tiny diver as he swims in any direction (left stick) and shoots in any independent direction (right stick). The game itself is exactly like Unreal Tournament's Domination mode, where two teams compete to control a number of Control Points, which in Undertow double as spawn points. A team loses when they can no longer field even a single diver, either because they've run out of respawn tickets or because the other side controls every spawn point on the map. (I should point out that I'm using "spawn" in the video game sense, not the traditional fish-fucking sense. Sadly.) And, just like Domination, the whole thing's about as boring and pointless as it sounds. The single player campaign has a potentially awesome story about global warming and sea pirates and Captain Nemo and the lost city of Atlantis, that's unfortunately told through awful in-engine cutscenes of player models chatting through their diving masks, interspersed with seemingly endless identical games of Domination. Oh, and this is probably a bug, but you can't start a game from the main menu if there's a joystick and guitar peripheral plugged into your 360's USB ports. I'm not even going to mention how long it took me to figure that one out. <b>The Bottom Lion:</b> Pick this up if you're Aqua Man, Herman Melville, a sailor, or any other synonym for faggot. For everyone else, I give it one "paw" out of "roar."[/quote]