The Hidden Below (DOS)

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Description

The Hidden Below ("THB") involves finding a large army of evil aliens under a factory, and sending them back to where they came from.

The custom built engine used for the game, the "VR-6" engine, can be described as a hybrid of the "Wolf3D" and "Doom" engines, in some ways more advanced than the later but in some ways being more akin to the former.

Features in THB include VGA graphics, several resolutions with the ability to set height and width separately (80/160/320x240/400), stairs, diagonally angled walls, slopes, teleporters, switches, damaging terrain, controllable security cameras, crouching, light levels, flickering lights, rendered cut scenes, targeting assist’s, auto map providing pickups, ambient sounds and the ability to look up and down. The game also keeps a score and displays the best on a high score table.

In terms of content, THB has 20 large levels with radically changing texture themes, 40 different opponents with individual AI (though this includes a number of re-coloured opponents) and 14 different weapon systems.

The run and gun in THB is considerably slower paced than the above mentioned games, relying more on each individual bad guy being of high toughness and limited amounts of health pickups, rather than large numbers of foes.

The visuals of THB are a little disjointed having been done in several different styles from gritty to cell shaded, digitized to hand drawn etc.

The sound is stated as being 16bit, though the game actually has three different quality settings for sound effects.

Screenshots

Promo Images

Part of the Following Group

• 3D Engine: VR-6

User Reviews

Starts out promising, but fails miserably in the end

Shock Wave (10)

Critic Reviews

PC Joker	Sep, 1994	76 out of 100	76
PC Games (Germany)	Sep, 1994	69 out of 100	69
ASM (Aktueller Software Markt)	Oct, 1994	8 out of 12	67
Power Play	Sep, 1994	62 out of 100	62
Play Time	Sep, 1994	60 out of 100	60
PC Player (Germany)	Oct, 1994	58 out of 100	58
Shooterplanet	Nov 04, 2006	45 out of 100	45

Forums

Topic	# Posts	Last Post
Level11/12 unfinishable?	1	Verm -- (272) Nov 18, 2009

Trivia

Demo version

The demo version of the game has death graphics for bad guys. However in the full version, they simply disappear when defeated.

Because of this, the demo version readme states that while the demo can be freely distributed, it can't be given to minors, which is presumably why the death graphics were removed from the full version (so it could be more widely distributed).

Innovations

The Hidden Below is reputed to be the first German made FPS game and the first PC first-person shooter in which you can look up and down, beating Raven Software's much more widely known DOOM engine based game Heretic, which boasted a similar feature, by a few months. The Hidden Below came out in August, Heretic in December.