Games for your summer break: 'Fire Emblem: Awakening'

A selection of recent free to mid-price games for the relaxing holidaymaker, whether traveling or at home. Today, 'Fire Emblem: Awakening,' one of the 3DS's best games.

Fire Emblem: Awakening (3DS)

Aggregate ratings: Metacritic - 92, GameRankings - 92, ReviewTrax - Excellent, Allgame - 4.5/5

Japanese studio Intelligent Systems certainly has a knack for taking complex, strategy-oriented titles and making them utterly enjoyable and incredibly easy to understand.

Where the 'Advance Wars' series had players commanding one of two opposing armies, and the 'Pushmo' games sees a little creature set about solving 3D puzzles, 'Fire Emblem: Awakening' takes on the RPG genre, fusing combat and narrative adventure.

Assassination plots, strange premonitions, the power of friendship, and the threat of a great evil are woven into the storyline of 'Fire Emblem: Awakening.'

That story is told through extravagant cutscenes, bird's-eye-view battles, an expanding party of customizable characters, and the dialogue that takes place between them.

There's plenty of time to plan out combat maneuvers, and allies placed next to each other will team up in attack and defense -- though it's advisable to start on 'normal' difficulty unless already familiar with the series' challenge.

New to the series is the concept of relationships between characters -- the more your party members fight together, the better they get along, and they may even end up marrying, passing on their best traits to their kids.

Such is the high regard in which 'Fire Emblem: Awakening' is held that our four aggregate services provide only eight 3DS titles of similar or greater repute: 'Super Mario 3D Land,' 'Shovel Knight,' 'Cave Story,' 'Pokémon X/Y,' 'Pushmo,' 'Super Street Fighter IV' and Zelda adventures 'Ocarina of Time 3D' and 'A Link Between Worlds.'