Fortress Review - GBA

Gameplay

Fortress is basically Tetris with attacking pieces. Everyone's played Tetris before, so I won't bore you by explaining the basics of that game. In Fortress, the aim is to build your own...fortress, funnily enough. Blocks fall from the sky, which you rotate and stack up. Clumps of blocks will turn into brick walls when enough blocks connect.

At the beginning of each round, you drop a portcullis of sorts, and then you have about 40 seconds to set the width of your castle. There are flags on either side of your portcullis which show the limits of your fortress. You can expand them by dropping blocks at the edge of the flags (an invisible wall stops you from going further), and then the flag shifts along. At the same time, your opponent is shifting his boundaries closer to you. Once both competitors' flags are next to each other, you start building up your fortress and arming it.

A few new blocks have been introduced into Fortress that weren't in Tetris. As all you Tetris veterans out there would know, all the pieces in that game were made of four smaller blocks. In Fortress, there a few three-block pieces, including a corner piece and a shorter straight piece. Taking the place of the two-by-two square from Tetris is a battle block. It shows either a cannon or a doorway, and by pressing the rotate key you can switch between them.

The cannon, obviously, is an attacking piece. Placed securely (don't put it on just one block!), it will shoot cannonballs at the opponent's fortress, destroying blocks, and rendering those blocks above it unstable. If your opponent puts a block on an unsteady pile, it will all collapse. The doorway block sends out little cavemen. They float around and fix the broken blocks your enemy's cannons damaged.

If you manage to stack six blocks by three in a column, it will turn into a tower and a magician will summon a creature who will do some serious damage to the opposition. The manual only explains this briefly, and it's the only way to summon the great monster of each land. Initially it seems unfair that the opposition is releasing all these powerful creatures and you can't.

The aim of Fortress is to get a certain amount of points before your opponent does. You gain points by destroying the opposition, making combos, even just holding down to make your piece accelerate quicker!

Unfortunately, although it sounds fun on paper, it's not as well done as you'd hope. First things first - Majesco have been stingy on the environments. There are four places to battle ... (continued next page)