With a brand new TV show, a movie in (perpetual) development and an ongoing comic series, 80s super robot series Voltron is a franchise that has had a surprising lack of a video game presence, with only a mobile game from two years ago putting the Voltron Lions to use. THQ and Behavior Interactive have finally changed this with the digital title Voltron: Defenders of the Universe, available now on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 MS Points.

If youre a Voltron fan, you’ll feel a blast from the past when you load up Voltron: Defender of the Universe. The game opens with the opening cinematic from the television series, and tells the story of the Voltron Force and their battle against King Zarkon using clips taken directly from the series. The game’s story is split into three different chapters, each one focusing on a different episode of the TV show, narrated by clips directly from the show. While playing it, it is apparent that the game is a love letter crafted for Voltron fans, using clips from the original series, faithfully recreates the enemies Voltron faced, and even uses narrator Peter Cullens voice to state that Voltron will return after these messages when the player hits the pause button. While this may appeal to Voltron fans, the downside is that those not familiar with the show may find the plot a bit chaotic as the jump between each level is narrated with clips from the show, which offer no real explanation of who the characters are or what exactly is going on.

The gameplay itself uses the tried-and-true dual stick shooter formula for its gameplay. Placing you in control of one of the Voltron Lions, you fight your way across the three different campaigns. The combat is relatively simple your Lion has its default laser attack using the right controller stick, and can use a melee charge to ram enemies or use a leaping attack to take down flying enemies or jump over long distances. As you follow the objective markers and fight off waves of enemies, youll be assigned various tasks you need to complete to move on to the next portion of the level, such as defeat a sub-boss, or search for generators to knock out electrical forcefields that prevent you from moving on to the next location, helping add a bit of variety to the move ahead and shoot everything nature of the game.

Each of the three chapters consists of four stages, the first three being the dual stick shooter portion of the game, with the final mission consisting of a boss fight. The game occasionally throws in new enemies in each chapter, but for the most part, the enemies youll encounter are just reskinned ones from the previous chapter with a slight power boost, meaning the 3 hour campaign can begin to drag a bit towards the end of the game.

To help tone down repetitiveness, the developers have added a few interesting mechanics to the mix. One of these is the inclusion of two shoot em up missions in the game, where your character pilots a Voltron Lion through outer space. The design of these missions is relatively the same as the normal missions, with one stick controlling your Lion, one allowing you to shoot, and the leap button replaced with a dodge move to allow you to avoid incoming enemies. But despite the similarity in mechanics, this portion makes a nice break from the usual levels, with the enemy patterns being designed so that youll constantly be dodging lasers and projectiles as you fight off the enemy waves and bosses. It isnt a particularly complex mode, containing no power ups for your character, but it helps introduce something fresh to the gameplay.

The other notable change is the Survivor Mode mechanic. Once your Lions health runs out, your Voltron Force character is ejected onto the battlefield. Armed with a puny laser weapon that does little damage, youre tasked with staying alive for 10 seconds as your Lion repairs. Surviving the experience allows you to re-enter your Lion without losing a single life, while failing results in the loss of a life and a respawn.

It isnt easy being an all-powerful dictator. It may seem that that the worlds tyrannical rulers enjoy a life of luxury and unbridled power, but Tropico 4 teaches us that managing the affairs of a banana republic (of the kind thats not a clothing retailer) is more akin to a delicate balancing act. Various internal factions, foreign powers and socioeconomic issues all demand your attention. So much so that youll barely have any time at all to sit back and enjoy sipping pia coladas out of the skulls of your enemies (or whatever your average dictator does in his or her downtime). What can we say — its tough at the top.

Kalypso Medias Tropico 4 follows the pursuits of El Presidente, your very own personalized despot, as he expands the reach of his power across the Caribbean. If youve played any previous Tropico games before, youll be very much at home here — the gameplay, graphical style and sense of humor of Tropico 3 are alive and well in the sequel. El Presidente himself defaults to a Fidel Castro-esque appearance, however you can choose from a number of preset characters, or create your own from the ground up. Your character customizations also determine the position in which youll start the game. For example, if you decide you came to power in a communist revolution, chances are youll have better relations with Mother Russia than Uncle Sam. Likewise, youll probably have some way to go to please the capitalist factions in your own island.

In the end, my Presidentes look ended up falling somewhere between Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley. With my white spangled suit, dapper top-hat and stylish chin curtain beard, I was ready to rule.

Tropicos nation-building antics take place across the games 20 campaign missions, and things start off fairly simply, with basic tasks like ensuring everyone has plenty of food to eat. Before long, though, your attention moves onto more complex matters like building hospitals to keep your citizens healthy, and police stations and prisons to maintain law and order. To staff these new institutions youll at first need to hire college-educated foreigners, before you can eventually build schools and colleges to train your own citizens. And then theres the question of how youre going to pay for all this — your island nation will need to trade with the outside world in order to make enough cash to sustain itself.

Youll also need to manage your workforce, making sure your farms, hospitals and other institutions arent under or overstaffed, and paying them enough to ensure a reasonable quality of life without breaking the bank. Of course, ultimately its up to you to decide which path you take. Will you be the benevolent dictator, guiding your citizens to happiness and improving their quality of life? Or will you follow the path of the tyrannical despot, seeking power, money and glory for yourself while subduing the populace and shaking an angry fist at disapproving foreign powers? Whatever you choose, Tropico has plenty to keep you occupied. As well as balancing your islands infrastructure, economy, foreign affairs and the like, you can also partake in challenges for cash rewards. For example, export enough of a certain resource and a faction or foreign power might reward you with a generous payment to your private Swiss bank account (because thats where evil people keep their money).

So theres quite a bit of depth to Tropico 4s gameplay, and El Presidente will undoubtedly find himself with a lot to do. Very quickly the game requires you to juggle every aspect of your countrys internal affairs and foreign relations, while keeping your citizens sweet so as to avoid being overthrown or voted out of office. In that respect, its a little like some of the later stages in Sid Meiers Civilization series, albeit much simpler and more accessible. Despite doing a great job to balance gameplay depth and newbie-friendliness, though, gameplay can sometimes turns into a bit of a house of cards, especially later in the game. You end up losing the sense of being a powerful dictator, and instead theres the feeling that youre spending every moment pandering to various NPCs, factions and foreign powers. The core of the Tropico 4 experience is solid and enjoyable, though, and particularly addictive once you get to grips with the basics. Throughout the campaign, and especially in Sandbox mode, its easy to become quite attached to the burgeoning nation that youve lead since it was little more than a collection of shanty-towns.

It’s time now to turn our attention to the world of mystery and conniving plots that are the crux of the Assassin. Ubisoft has given us the fourth entry in the Assassin’s Creed series in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. It is a direct sequel to the prior title in this line-up and picks up where the last game leaves off. And in that vein, I would start by not recommending that you play this game if you have not played the preceding titles in the Assassins Creed universe. Revelations starts off assuming you know exactly what has happened thus far in terms of Desmonds story and also the stories of Altair and Ezio. Further to this, you will also hear some details of the ending of Brotherhood. So in a nutshell, for the best experience and to avoid getting prior games storylines spoiled for you, I would recommend playing the games in order.

Now that the public service announcement is out of the way, lets discuss the game at hand. The first quality that you will notice about this title is that it is graphically stunning. While playing as Ezio, the city of Constantinople (not yet Istanbul, for you They Might Be Giants fans) is detailed and beautiful, full of color and varied in appearance. Inhabiting the city is a throng of non-playable characters whose outfits are detailed and breath-taking. When playing as Altair as well, you get the same brilliant color palette and overall impressive visuals. Truly this game is a sight to behold. Theres less of an impressive look when you are playing as Desmond in the Animus of course, but those parts are not as prominently-featured in the game.

From an auditory perspective (easy Ezio pun ignored) the game shines as well. The sounds of a bustling city bristled from my surround speaker setup and added to the immersive qualities of the title. Hearing vendors trying to woo me to buy their wares, or hearing the distant shouts of a town crier a few blocks away, really put me in Ezios shoes as I made my way across Constantinople in search of my next target or objective. The music in the game is appropriate to the time periods, and complements the action (or the somber tones as well) nicely. The voice acting played a part in me losing myself in the world that Ubisoft created here, too. The accents used, coupled with the occasional word or phrase spoken in the characters native tongues, were all very well-performed.

The gameplay is everything you would expect it to be, plus some things you might not have anticipated. You still have the incredibly smooth-feeling parkour-esque tactics employed by Ezio and Altair, allowing for the ability to hop from roof to roof, scale buildings with lightning-quick pace, and jump down from high buildings into bales of hay below in what can only be described as a suicidal swan-dive to safety. With the inclusion of the new hook blade, Ezio can also extend his reach while climbing or jumping from roof to roof, and even use it to slide down a cable from rooftop to rooftop. The resulting experience is one that is rich and intuitive for the large portion of the time playing. There were some times that I ended up on the side of a tall building, inputting what I thought was a command to jump up and to the left to another hand-hold, only to see Ezio turn completely to the left and jump away from the building entirely, resulting in an ungraceful exit from that particular memory. Some of this was likely my own error, but I think there were just a few areas where it was a matter of level design or control awkwardness. Again, not a huge issue, but worth mentioning for sure.

In other gameplay topics, you have the ability to craft bombs at various bomb-crafting stations throughout the city. You take an outer casing (of which there are a few to choose from), fill it with one of a variety of gunpowders, and include an ordinance of some kind, be it blood (for freaking out people who see the resulting splatter everywhere), caltrops (for injuring and tripping up people as they try to escape), shrapnel (for killing those in a close radius) or any other of a myriad of options, then you place it into your bomb satchel for use later. Its a system that works really well, giving the player even more freedom over how he or she would choose to complete the objectives laid out before them. There are definitely reasons you would want to use diversionary-type bombs in some situations and deadly ones in others. Beyond bombs you also have a hidden pistol at your disposal, and throwing knives as well.

The combat is engaging and keeps you on your toes as you progress through the storyline. Initially the foes you face will not be much of a challenge, but as you go and eventually get head-to-head with Janissaries, you will need to employ much more advanced hand-to-hand combat tactics in order to overcome them. I found myself getting frustrated, but in a good way, when I wasnt able to simply button-mash my way to victory in all of my fights. It made those eventual victories mean more to me, that I had grown in my capacity to be able to dispatch foes.

The King of Fighters franchise has been around almost as long as mainstays like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat yet it does not received the same amount of respect and exposure from the gaming media and casual fans alike. The latest entry in the long running series hit store shelves late last month. Should you save up for quarters for SNK Playmore’s latest fighter?

KOF XIII follows a familiar formula that has been perfected over time. Similar to Mortal Kombat (2011) & Street Fighter IV, KOF XIII utilizes a refined fighting system very reminiscent of previous entries in the franchise. Fights take place on an entirely 2D plane, just like the other fighting games that have been released during the recent resurgence. Unlike other games fights can be completed in two different configurations – either one on one or two teams of three. Fighters have access to two different types of kicks and punches and combinations of medium and low punches mapped to the triggers. Blocking on coming attacks is also simple, yet effective, which is completed by holding the back button.

Don’t let the simple core mechanics turn you off of King of Fighters XIII. Once super moves, the EX Meter and Hyper Drive meter have been factored in things get a lot more interesting. Each character has three or four special moves. These range from the expected fireballs, enhanced grapples to more unconventional “armor” moves that cancel even hyper drive combos for a limited time. Speaking of the Hyper Drive moves casual fans can look at them as a cross between Ultimate Marvel’s hyper combos and Street Fighter’s EX Moves. Once you have pulled off the specific inputs for the Hyper Drive move your character will perform an enhanced move that deals more damage than your standard special moves. They aren’t as flashy as Ultimate Marvel’s but given KOF XIII’s slower sense of speed they work wonderfully.

The King of Fighters XIII features 30 different characters divided in to ten “teams”. When playing through the story mode you’ll guide your selected teams through pre-determined matches with the ability to switch teams at certain instances. The story elements are presented with still anime photos with limited voice acting. This presentation was really cool earlier in the decade, on the previous generation hardware, but now it just feels lazy. Games like Super Street Fighter IV had fully voice acted story modes with animated cut-scenes. The lack of full voice acting and fluid cut-scenes feel like a lost opportunity.

Standard versus play is perhaps the most interesting thing on offer in KOF XIII. Each of the thirty characters are varied with their own special moves and flair. Characters like Athena utilizes particle attacks and the previously mentioned armor abilities while characters like Kim and Joe focus more on fast paced martial arts kicks. There is a character for everyone in KOF and within a few rounds new strategies become apparent for even the most complex fighter. Exploring the game with friends and playing around with all of the characters is some of the most fun to be had.

The graphics in KOF XIII deserve to be talked about. In age where every fighting game uses polygonal models and particle effects, King of Fighters throws back the clock with full HD hand drawn sprites. Each fighter has a unique look and feel complete with fluid motion. The backgrounds in KOF XIII are more or less and static with not much going on in the background. The trade off is of course the beautifully drawn hand drawn art. You’ll fight in the streets of London, a Dojo in Japan and in a Chinese temple.

At the end of the day can King of Fighters XIII compete with the other fighting juggernauts released this year? It probably will not get as much attention as it should. The strong cast of characters, each of them with their own unique look & feel, really gives KOF XIII a certain appeal. Fans of Anime will absolutely adore the artwork. We haven’t seen 2D animation this fluid on the Xbox 360 in sometime. There is a lot of content between the Online, Versus, Training, Mission & Story modes. There are some areas of the presentation, namely within the story, that could have used some work. If you are looking for a different fighting experience King of Fighters XIII should fit the bill.