Have you ever pondered, perhaps in the early hours of the morning, whilst you toss and turn in your bed, unable to sleep as your mind keeps on yammering away, whether a sentient snot creature would be any good in a fight? Yes? Then, my friend, Underling Uprising is for you.
Underling Uprising is the most 90s game I’ve ever played. Heck, it out-90s actual games I played in the 90s with its unstoppable 90s-ness. With Saturday-morning cartoon visuals that pitch-perfectly replicate TV classic The Powerpuff Girls, alongside a coin-up inspired Arcade gameplay loop, Underling Uprising is the exact type of game tweenage me loved and shoved far too many 50p pieces into. You and up to three-other players over split-screen co-op will punch, kick, and snot-slap your way through seven impressively lengthy levels. As you’d expect, there are numerous mini-bosses and bosses to take down, weapons to pick up to put baddies down, and numerous as well vehicles to ride in palette cleansing shoot ‘em up sections.
The player characters are delightfully inventive and, considering the limitations of the punch and walk gameplay, impressively varied. There’s the mechanised Mexican luchadore Angel, who unleashes bionic body slams and engine powered elbow drops, followed up by girl and ghost tag team Rose and Lola, who can hurl spooky ghost-balls to great effect. Deckster is a rad skateboarding monkey straight out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle school, flipping and cartwheeling to his heart’s content, whilst Boogie is the aforementioned snot soldier who can shapeshift into all manner of objects – including, yes, a grand piano – to deal out inventive damage. It’s a wonderfully eclectic roster, and soon the screen is covered in outrageous special attacks that decimate the evil scientist you spend most of your time beating up.
Combat is simple but effective. There are no strict inputs here, instead, by switching between your regular combo attacks and a designated combo finisher, your free to create your own attack strings. It’s a generous system and demands to be exploited, allowing you to juggle enemies and barely suffer any damage for entire levels if you put the effort in. Also, if you don’t want to put that amount of effort in, the game is perfectly happy to be a larger-than-life party brawler that offers fun and fisticuffs for all the family.
Though, there are some caveats. Input lag is often painfully slow, with your player character refusing to do what they’re told promptly enough. In the cathartic chaos of four-player co-op you’re unlikely to notice but decide to undertake the game in solo or dual play and things will soon get frustrating as you simply don’t have enough control to manage the hordes of enemies heading your way.
Indeed, those same hordes lead to plentiful amounts of framerate drops, particularly when players unleash their colourful screen cluttering finishers. This, and the jarring loads between screens, rather ruin the flow of the game, making the gameplay often quite stodgy and ponderous, rather than achieving the lightning-fast fighting frolics of classic side scroller Castle Crashers. I get the impression The Behemoth’s finest heavily inspired developers Dummy Dojo; and, visually at least, this is a mighty fine mimic, but there needs to be some rock-solid post-launch patching to get this fighter’s gameplay into peak shape.
