Barrack

Meticulously crafted by Greg Lovette, Barrack is a game that is hard to pigeonhole. It exhibits a precarious balance between action and strategy; thinking and reflex. The feeling you get from playing Barrack is an eccentric harmony between the automatic, mind-numbing pleasure of Tetris and the kind of action found in Maelstrom. The result is that you'll be left with sweat on your brow. Barrack's goal is deceptively simple; there are a number of balls on the play field that are bouncing like a neurotic on a sugar rush. Your job is to use your shooter to isolate them. Sounds easy, right? It isn't. First of all, if a ball breaks your shooter's particle beam before it tears through the play field, your shooter overloads and explodes in a cascade of fire and scrap metal. The second problem is that these aren't any ordinary balls. They have more personalities than Sybil, and none of them are particularly friendly. We'll leave the particulars up to your imagination for now, but suffice it to say that these aren't the kind of balls you get from bubble gum machines. Oh, did we forget to mention the land shark? Bosco is a rare breed of shark capable of rearranging his molecular structure at will. This enables him to travel at quite a clip through otherwise solid substances. If you don't pay attention while he closes in on your shooter, you may end up being fish-bait. He's tenacious, voracious, and about every other -acious you can think of, all rolled into one lean, mean, shooter-munchin' machine. Barrack features stunning artwork, intense action, vibrant 8-channel stereo sound effects, and the addictiveness that comes standard in an Ambrosia game.