Underground Rush Demo

Thanks to the state of current technology and the facilities provided by high speed Internet connections, everyone is pretty much capable of developing anything from music, to movies and video games. While the latter was until recently the domain of large studios with many employees and big budgets, indie developers now have the latest graphics engines and tools at their disposal as well, as long as they also have a good PC to take advantage of them.

Underground Rush is a good example of why an entire team is usually needed to develop a solid game, because it perfectly illustrates the flaws of an amateur attempt at game design. However, this is also mostly because of the theme approached by the developer, since zombie survival games require a lot of attention nowadays, given the fact that there are countless triple-A titles out there doing the same thing.

To start off with, the level design is nothing special and the rooms are usually way too narrow to create the proper atmosphere. The lighting is also poor, so any attempt at inspiring dread and fear go out the window immediately as well. There is no background story either, since all you ever see is the main menu and the first room you have to clear of zombies shortly thereafter. Immersion is definitely not part of the equation, so don’t expect much in this department.

On the other hand, things are not much better when it comes to the actual shooting either, because all you have to do is point at the zombies and click whenever they get close enough. There are a few different weapons to try out, including a katana and a shotgun, but the melee weapons are almost impossible to use properly without getting damaged yourself, while the shotgun takes forever to load.

From a technical point of view, the graphics are not exactly bad, but in bad taste. A tremendous amount of gloom was added as a post-processing effect, which has the purpose of neutralizing every trace of horror atmosphere left. The textures are quite nice, but you can see that they are just slapped onto crude 3D shapes and no effort went into things like bump mapping, or the like. Hence, everything looks flat and unconvincing, in the end.

While Underground Rush could have just as easily been a side project for the developers to learn how to use the tools and do a better job on an actual game, you must pay to play this, so it needs to be judged against the other commercial video games. However, since it lacks almost every feature of a commercial game from a qualitative point of view, it’s pretty difficult to see a reason one would exchange currency for this it.