You are a diver in an underwater maze. Throughout the maze are valuable diamonds, and your goal is to retrieve as many as you can. In the middle of the screen is a shark cage where you begin. As you collect diamonds you need to bring them back to the shark cage in order to earn points. Swimming back and forth constantly is a deadly shark. If the shark encounters any of the diamonds, it will eat them; likewise you can also be eaten by the shark, causing you to lose a life. You have no defense against the shark, however you are immune if you are in the shark cage and the doors are closed. Somewhere in the maze the Loch Ness monster remains hidden. If you disturb the monster, it will continuously chase you unless you can lead it back into one of the caves located in the corners of the screen.
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Sticking to the positive for a moment, the suddenness of the shark coming on screen and the intimidating sound it makes create a nice tense atmosphere for an arcade game. That's about all of the positives.
Moving onto the negatives: let's focus on just the shark. While it's an awesome idea at the beginning of the game that offers a nice bit of tension to the gameplay loop (he's not bound by the maze and simply crosses the screen horizontally at seemingly random heights), the concept does not scale well with speed whatsoever. Collect a few jewels to raise your score and suddenly he'll be rocketing across the screen at a lightning pace with no warning at all. God forbid you have to venture near the edge of the screen for any reason -- you'll be placing your life in the hands of your own luck.
There is another enemy, I suppose an octopus, that occasionally spawns in once you have more points and chases you around the maze. It's a little more bound by the maze, but not really, and again, after gathering some points, will be so fast that it's nearly impossible to dodge for any real length of time.
And yet it might be somewhat possible if not for the game's worst flaw: the horrendous movement mechanics. Unfortunately your swimmer is wearing a suit coated in velcro and all the walls are made of velcro and if you touch any wall you're guaranteed to be hard stuck on that bad boy until you vigorously wiggle your way off of it. At the higher speeds (which come on in little more than about 1-2 minutes of play) getting stuck for even a moment is basically certain death. Unfortunate, then, that it happens constantly without any real possible recourse.
All in all, I'd say Shark Attack is probably one of the games that would come to mind if someone asked me what the worst Atari 2600 games of all time are. That's really something to say on a system notorious for having so many bad games that it crashed the entire video game market.
Still, the shark concept is kind of neat so it can have a star.