Fortress (GBA): Not SolidThis is a classic example of a great concept poorly executed. The premise is that you are a little caveman. Or knight. Or pirate. Or spaceman (there are four different eras to play in. Exciting!). Another little caveman or etc. sits across from you. So what do you do? No! Not befriend him! You need to establish your territory! Build a fortress! And when he starts building one next to you, you need to try to knock his fortress down! Clearly.
See what I mean? Sounds like a fun idea: build your own fort while trying to demolish your opponent's. And it's all done by dropping oddly shaped blocks to form large rectangles, ala Tetris? Brilliant! But that's where the fun stops. Sure, the Tetris style building is solid, and it is fun to see your castle erect itself when you connect large squares of blocks. But the offensive bit where you try to knock down your opponent's fort is where this game falls flat. There is no indication what you have to do in order to receive offensive weaponry (I read later that you get one for reaching point milestones) but even armed with that knowledge, it still seemed arbitrary whenever I would receive a cannon with which to pulverize my opponent. And I had absolutely no idea how to summon a creature like my AI opponent was currently doing. Apparently you have to build a stack of 8x2 blocks. None of this is intuitive, and there is no tutorial to explain it all. Even then, once you amass your fortress and begin the slaughter of your opponent's caveman, you cannot watch his demise. Your camera is firmly locked on your own fortress as you clumsily stack blocks away. The one time, the one and only time I actually summoned a dragon (purely on accident, by the way) I wanted to watch it demolish the other guy. But I couldn't. The only satisfaction I received was the sound of dragon destruction, and my point tally increasing slightly.
So in essence this game could have been great, but it falls short in execution. The idea is extremely solid, and the gameplay would have been fun if I had an idea of what I was supposed to be doing, but the game itself lacked (snicker) structure.
Graphics
9 Sound
7 Addictive
5 Depth
3 Story
4 Difficulty
9
User Notice 
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