"Ceeeeeease fire! *BOOM, BABA BOOM BA BOOM...*"

People who love warfare and fast paced puzzle games will love this. Rampart is all about blasting the enemy into smithereens and conquering all land around you. Can *you* stand your ground and patch up your wounds at the same time?

Story: 4
Your kingdom is trying to expand, but keeps getting attacked from the water. Yes, it is strange that the king just doesn't build his castles inland, but there isn't any challenge in that, now is there? :)

Gameplay: 8
You get one castle and three cannons when you start a campaign. After you choose the castle you want to start with and position your cannons, the ships will attack. DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY! Don't worry, even if you don't blow up all the ships before the fighting wave ends, you'll still have a chance to recover from the damage they did to you. Rebuilding the castle walls isn't as easy as it sounds, however. You get random, Tetris looking blocks to use to rebuild your walls. Not only that, you have to completely surround your castle with walls to make its cannons usable again, that means no diagonal connections and no using the edge of the map as a wall! If you have a piece that you simply can't do ANYTHING with, you'll have to place it out of the way and see if the next one will be more useful. To make things harder, there isn't a Next window like in Tetris!

Sometimes, there may be obstacles keeping you from putting a wall in a critical, needed place, such as smoking, unsalvageable rubble. This makes the game hard and also frustrating at times, but it also makes you use your brain. The only thing you can do is to try to surround the obstacle as well. Obstacles seem to appear more often when you don't do well shooting the ships, so the best defense in this game is a good offense. Oh, by the way, you only get about 30 seconds in rebuild mode. :)

Another thing you should do during the rebuilding phase is to surround other castles with walls. The more castles you have, the more cannons you can command. Make sure you also include room around the castle you are encapsulating so you can place your new cannons! Capturing all the castles doesn't make you the winner, but it sure makes it easier to fight off the ships.

There are two types of ships. The standard type of ship shoots normal cannons at you and aren't that sturdy. They can be quite fast, though, and will try to distract you while other ships do damage to your walls. Ships differently colored from the standard ships are slow, take a lot of punishment before they go down and actually put rebuilding obstacles on your land. Get rid of these first if there are any. Luckily, you can shoot the land troops that are discharged by this ship.

When you play a two player game, each player controls land, castles and cannons; noone can control ships.

Graphics: 6
Nothing bad, but nothing spectacular. You see the cannonballs fly upward and downward due to the bird's eye view of the game. Castles and ships look like castles and ships.

Sound/Music: 10
All of the cannon shooting and explosion sound effects are digital! No noise channel usage at all! This make warring sound quite realistic and cool. The voice of the king commanding the cannons is also awesome. The music is the game is damn good due to the digital war drum clips. Those war drums set the warring mood with STYLE!

Control: 8
The cannons control very well. Your cursor moves slow, but then again, changing the directions of those cannons takes many strong men to do. This adds realism. The bad part of the control is the fact that when you're placing walls and it would be quicker to move the cursor over the water to get to the land you want to get to, the game doesn't let you. I think that's dumb. Obviously make it impossible to place walls on the water, but why keep us from moving the cursor through it? It wastes time to move the cursor across the land. I guess it adds challenge, but I think many people will agree with me when they say that that's not the way to add challenge to this game.

Replay Value: 5
Once you beat all of the single player scenarios, you will only want to play with another person. This will be fun for a while, because no player will ever get the same wall blocks twice.

Bottom Line?
This action/puzzle/strategy game is unique, innovative and fun. Yes, there could have been a little better scenario variety, but Rampart still gives you an enjoyable challenge when it comes to marksmanship and how quick you can surround your castles, plus the war drums are very, very cool, which is why I give it an 8.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/04/01, Updated 10/04/01