During the holidays, Microsoft announced that Xbox Live members were going to receive a free XBLA game and decided, last week, that this game was Undertow. I personally don’t have many experiences with XBLA games so I really didn’t know what to expect.

My opinion: A surprisingly fun game.

At first, I watched the little video preview included in a past article. The game looked like a pretty fast paced arcade shooter set underwater. The cut-scenes weren’t exactly pretty but I didn’t expect much for a XBLA game.

The game’s style is a mix between Battlefield and old space shooters where you have to get capture points and get the enemies’ tickets to 0 while shooting them down with a selected underwater character. By default, shooting is done with the right analog stick; pointing in the direction you want. There is a total of 4 types of character classes that you can switch between during the game and all of them are upgradeable three times each. Shooting down enemies and capturing control points earns you points which are used for upgrades.

The story’s cut-scenes could have been dropped as they didn’t add much to the game. The voice acting was sub-par as well. Basically, you are an underwater pirate that everyone wants to eliminate you for some odd reason.

I played this game for about 1.5 hours yesterday and it was an entertaining. Gameplay isn’t bad at all and it’s pretty fast paced for an arcade game. I didn’t have time to try the multiplayer portion of it but I will probably do so this weekend.

Since this game is free (until January 26th), I recommend that you download and try this game. It’s a surprisingly fun game but wouldn’t be worth the 800 MS points that Microsoft charges.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under Previews & Impressions, XBLA Previews, Xbox 360 Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.