Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

Much like food, there are games that we always go back to after performing an excursion into the vast wilderness of the frontier. These are our comfort games, the ones that we can always depend on to be full of replayability and excellent game mechanics. The kind of game that we sit down and play between rounds of Team Fortress 2 or after a long marathon session of Oblivion. Kenta Cho's shmup games, like Torus Trooper and rRootage, are comfort games thanks to their endless replayability and arcade-style addictiveness. Gaming comfort food. And Gunroar is among their ranks as well.

Gunroar is, much like the rest of Kenta Cho's games, a shoot-'em-up, or shmup. It incorporates quick reflexes, good gameplay, and high replayability for a game that will probably never leave your hard drive. To get the quick and dirty part of the game, Gunroar is all about advancing down the screen quickly, eliminating enemies along the way. Unlike the other games of his that we have mentioned on Freeware Friday, Gunroar does not scroll for you and doesn't keep you from moving forward. All your progress is done on your whim. You choose to move forward and take risks, and you are rewarded for it!

Gunroar's graphics are heavily stylized, which is to be fully expected. Enemies are lines and blocks of color. When you destroy and enemy, it explodes into geometric shapes and spits out squares that increase your score. Along this same line, the audio is the same sort of adrenalin-pumping techno that Kenta Cho has done for his other games. This is far from bad, though. It keeps your heart pumping and makes you ready and raring to tear apart enemies. In a game where all you have are enemies, this is what you want!

The gameplay is fairly straightforward in all game modes. You must advance the screen by getting close to it, which increases your multiplier at the same time. Killing enemies gets you points, and you play until you die three times. Unlike most shmups, though, Gunroar is strictly time-based. Rather than advancing forward enough to reach a boss, or scoring enough points, once the timer reaches zero the current wave will clear and the boss will attack. And boy, the bosses are doozies. Taking up an entire screen by themselves and firing what can only be described as an incredible amount of bullets, it's hard to believe sometimes that they are randomly generated based on how well you are doing in the stage leading up to the boss.

The scoring system really deserves its own mention away from all the other elements, thanks to the simple complexity of it all. The basic function is that moving the screen forward increases your modifier, and staying still or moving backwards decreases it. Killing enemies will result in points being added to your score. Simple, no? However, there are two other elements that affect the score itself, and one that can affect the final report of your score, which is what muddies the waters a little bit. First of all, destroying the turrets on an enemy will increase the modifier you get for destroying them completely as well as snagging you some extra points. The ratio is about one turret adds 2.0 to the ship modifier. Therefore, destroying two turrets on a ship with three will add a x4 multiplier on that ship on top of your global multiplier. You can end up with truly massive multipliers on bosses this way, racking up the points like crazy!

After the destruction of an enemy, any shots that aren't the white diamonds (which can be destroyed by normal shots) or green cones (which are only shot every once in a while by the smallest boat) will be changed into items that your ship automatically collects, netting you a ton of points. This works on bosses as well as regular enemies, and entices you to draw tons of fire so that when you eliminate them you can get all the items. The flip side to this is that you have all that extra fire to dodge!

The final bit about scoring is that your score is on a rotary. Much like Earthbound, this rotary can be interrupted or even affected before it can even finish spinning. If you die in the middle of receiving a score, you might not get the full score of the things you killed. Therefore, sometimes the rotary is not an indication of your true end score. It's usually close enough, though.

Gunroar has multiple modes for you to play through, each of which offers a slightly different experience. The most major change between each mode is obviously the method of control, but there are a few other changes, depending on the mode.

• Normal: You control your ship solely with the keyboard. Firing in a direction causes your ship to freeze facing that direction. You gain a very powerful energy cannon that can be used to take down enemy ships extremely quickly.
• Mouse: You control the ship with your keyboard and mouse. You can move and fire in separate directions, and have a wide shot as well as a normal shot. The mode is obviously more maneuverable.
• Twin Stick: You control the ship with two analog sticks, much like Smash TV or Geometry Wars. Left stick controls direction, right stick controls shooting. The harder you press in a direction, the faster you will move in that direction. The same applies for shooting, although the harder you press, the tighter your shot becomes.
• Double Play: You control two ships linked by a line with a gun on it. Your ships and the gun continually fire forward, and the closer they get to each other, the slower they fire. This is the hardest control mode out of all of them, for obvious reasons.

There's nothing quite like the sweet satisfaction of just blowing some guys out of the water in a display of skill, and Gunroar definitely delivers on that point. With heavily stylized graphics, endearing gameplay, small file-size, and low system requirements, it can be enjoyed by just about any who want to chill out with some arcade action. Gunroar is available through our downloads section or Kenta Cho's website.

For another look at freeware games, take a look at Joystiq's Free Game Club weekly feature!