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An action-adventure roguelike with a bit of RPG tossed in. Adventure deep into the UnderMine and discover powerful relics, deadly enemies, hidden secrets, and a few friends to help along the way. After 5 years in development and a year in early access, UnderMine has finally reached its official release! UnderMine 1.0 will launch Thursday August 6th for PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, and Windows Store. It will also be available for Xbox and PC Game Pass. It’s hard to say how much this update means to us.

1. Undermine For Machine Learning
2. Undermine Mac Download

An action-adventure roguelike with a bit of RPG tossed in. Adventure deep into the UnderMine and discover powerful relics, deadly enemies, hidden secrets, and a few friends to help along the way.

Let me be clear from the start that for the most part I don’t enjoy rogue titles. I prefer to bond with my character and delve into story than smack my face against a wall endlessly with no gain. So if you are like me, then don’t sweat it, while Thorium’s latest title ‘UnderMine‘ does feature death and repetition it’s hardly punishing.

Synopsis

You play as an endless stream of peasants being stuffed into a gold mine on a quest to… well it evolves as the game progresses. Initially though you’re just there to bring gold back up to the surface. Along the way you’ll upgrade your equipment, unlock new equipment, rescue characters, fight bosses, and discover secrets.

Gameplay

UnderMine is essentially an action RPG that not only looks, but also plays, an awful lot like a Zelda title from Nintendo. Each peasant you stuff down the gold mine will kill monsters, mine gold, acquire powerful relics, and ultimately die. Upon death you’ll lose a percentage of the gold in your sack and start the adventure over back on the surface with a new peasant. You can spend the gold sent back on upgrading your equipment, and those upgrades are permanent, no matter how many times you die. Whether you reach new depths, or die early on, you’ll always be progressing.

One of the big killers with rogue titles for me is the repetition. On nearly every run down the dungeon levels in UnderMine I encountered something different or new. Whether it was rescuing a NPC character, discovering a new mechanic, or some truly super secret area by accident, I never got to the point where things started to get stale.

Controls

I played UnderMine with both a gamepad, and a keyboard and mouse and I have to say that the latter felt more responsive. The control pad isn’t twin stick so you have to turn your character and push the attack button, unlike with a mouth where your ranged weapon will simply fire at the cursor regardless. No doubt if you’re an avid fan of controllers you’ll get use to it quickly and it wont be much of a detriment, but given the choice I’d stick with keyboard and mouse.

Audio / Visual

Yup, sure does look 16-bit! If you grew up with a Super Nintendo you’ll feel right at home with UnderMine. I personally enjoy this kind of artwork, I spent a lot of time playing Link to the Past on the SNES. I’m fairly certain UnderMine is even using the 256 colour palette from the SNES, or something very close to it.

Sometimes though I found the screen could get a little ‘busy’ and I would have preferred rooms to be presented in more of a 4:3 ratio rather than using the entire screen. I found the bigger rooms to be harder as I simply wasn’t able to keep my eyes on everything at once.

At times some of the traps blended into the background, especially in busy rooms, making for annoyance.

Continually playing the game you eventually ‘git gud’ and both of those above issues become less of a concern.

While the music was quite good it did become repetitive fairly quickly and it wasn’t long until the music slider was nudged down to zero. Sound effects, like the visuals, are akin to a SNES title and do the job amicably.

Undermine For Machine Learning

Tips

To begin with you will really hate slimes pinching all your gold. You will get an upgrade fairly early on that will increase your movement speed when not in combat, this will help you outrun slimes.

Boss fights can be tough. Really tough. My advice is to avoid them early on completely while you grind out gold and upgrade your gear.

I found long binge sessions with the game a little tiring. UnderMine, for me is enjoyed best in spurts. I’d finish playing another game, do a run or two in UnderMine, then play something else. Your mileage may vary.

It’s all about gold to begin with, I put a lot of effort into getting the best sack early on to minimise waste.

Don’t bother hording keys and bomb, you’ll probably die before you get to use them all anway.

Speaking of bombs, keep an eye out for walls at the edge of a room with a ‘sparkle’, these are secret areas that can be opened by exploding the wall with a bomb.

Purple means cursed. You’ll sometimes find a purple brazier or such. If you explode it with a bomb you will get a relic or perk of some sort but you’ll also get a curse. Weigh up whether you want to be cursed or not before breaking.

Always buy food.

Summary

If you enjoy classic Super Nintendo action RPG titles like Link to the Past or Secret of Mana you’re really going to enjoy UnderMine. The rogue elements are far from punishing and there is always a sense of progression. There’s enough of a story to keep things interesting and for the ~$21.50 AUD asking price I can’t imagine anyone not getting their monies worth with this title.

UnderMine is available now on Windows/Mac/Linux (Steam) and Xbox One.
Steam Page – https://store.steampowered.com/app/656350/UnderMine/

• 1Current Patch Notes
• 21.0.2 - Small Update

Current Patch Notes[edit | edit source]

PC - 1.0.2[edit | edit source]

Undermine Mac Download

1.0.2 - Small Update[edit | edit source]

Released – September 17, 2020

Update Size – 201.12 KiB

Versions – 1.0.2.9 (Windows), 1.0.2.10 (Mac), 1.0.2.11 (Linux), 1.0.2.10 (Xbox)

Blog – https://steamcommunity.com/games/656350/announcements/detail/2896334282660985154

Bug Fixes[edit | edit source]

• Seer’s bite hitbox has been tightened up
• Seer is now immune to root abilities
• Health levers no longer reset their use counter when you exit the room
• Soul Cannon projectiles are now destroyed if their target becomes invalid
• Bombushka babies now spread out in all directions rather than always to the north east
• Arrows fired from wall traps will now correctly ignite if they pass over a torch
• Fixed a few issues with stat tooltips that would cause them to not display stats granted by Masa and Mune correctly
• Fixed an issue that would cause you to drop your extra potions when stabbed by the Gatekeeper
• Cleaned up a bad interaction between Ghost Pepper Sauce and Antimatter
• Fixed a graphical bug that would cause your current Summon Count to display as 100
• Fixed a data issue that would let you find Dungeon crawl space rooms on Goldmine 3
• Fixed a mismatch between stereo and spatial audio in the build process that could cause audio corruption on certain hardware
• Fixed a small graphical layering issue with the Gargoyle’s fireball attack
• When using a controller, the game will now pause if your controller becomes disconnected or runs out of batteries
• [Xbox] All stats-based achievements are now recalculated when the game starts, granting you any achievements you may have missed due to being offline

Other Changes[edit | edit source]

• [Xbox] Added a new slider to the Graphics options menu to manually adjust the game’s safe rendering area. This will allow players with TVs that do not have a built-in overscan feature to shrink or expand the rendering area so that the UI is not cut off
• Added Italian Translation

Versions