I love playing casual and simple games on the iPhone as I consider the device more as a phone. But gaming habit on the iPhone is changing very fast, developers are experimenting with different genre of games. Recently, Kevin told me that a neat RPG (Role Playing Game) game is the App Store (knowing I like playing that type of games on the PC). His intention of course was to push me to write a review and he did succeeded in that and here is the gist of the near excellent game. 

Underworlds from Pixel Mine, Inc is an RPG and a  classic dungeon crawl adventure game. In this game you are that medieval hero in this game and your mission is to swing your sword and slaughter rats, orcs and monsters to protect the people around you. You’ve to select your character and would be responsible for guarding McTavish’s caravan and protect the retinue from the attack of the malevolent Orc raiders.

Remember you are in a magical world and your real quest starts when you are send to Happy Cadavar Inn. The adventure is going to be a little bloody and scary, you’ve to kill the rats as they can cause outbreak of plague, slaughter orc, skeletons and other malevolent creatures as they are real threat to the human race. As the bloody battle continues, you gotta collect the loots in the form of gold, equipment and potions from the fallen enemies.  

There is a bit of strategical thinking required when you are spending the loot to get equipments or energy potions. You’ve to constantly watch your health and vitality displayed on the skulls placed on either side of the screen. You can purchase teleport charms to go back to McTavish Caravan and then to Happy Cadaver Inn to restock whatever is needed. 

You can play the game in easy, normal, hard and extreme modes. I have so far played the easy and the normal modes and I am impressed that the iPhone indeed is a threat to dedicated handheld game consoles. There are some tweaks and changes needed though to make this game a real killer. 

Pros and cons

First, I was really blown away by the graphics and was totally ignorant about the buggy nature of the control buttons. I end up tapping on the screen to find my way rather than the direction buttons. The vitality and health display skulls are just there for giving graphical effects, I think the game would look better without the useless skulls taking unnecessary space. 

I have the choice to select my characters, which I consider is cool, but when I am on the game the same armored character is displayed. This I consider is unfair. As of now, the audio content consists of only the stabbing sound, squeaking noise of the rats and rattling sound of the skeletons, which in some way is disappointing. However, I’ve heard words that the developer is working on adding exciting audio contents. Last, I feel there is a need to add more campaigns/missions to make this a game that can be played for hours and hours in a stretch. This is a real good start.

Check here for all iPhone adventure games.