Two princesses addicted to cake are the focus of the cute and comical (yet surprisingly bloody) game "Fat Princess." "Fat Princess" plays like a hybrid of real-time strategy and hack-and-slash action mixed with zone control and capture-the-flag game play, with the princesses as the "flags." The game is best played online with a group of up to 31 others – 16 to a side, with missing player positions filled by computer-controlled bots. Players can also set up a game against the computer.

There's a story mode that serves as a primer for the various game types here and tells a cute story about why the princesses are fat (the cake they crave is magical) and why they're imprisoned in opposing castles for the players to storm – but it's more a bonus than a proper campaign.

In the main mode, "Rescue the Princess," the blue princess is imprisoned in the red base, the red princess is in the blue base, and each side is trying to storm the enemy castle and haul its princess home. There are several battlegrounds, each with its own quirks, secrets and alternate routes to the enemy HQ.

The rescue plan is complicated by a few factors, among them the heavy doors and high walls of each fortress, the fighters streaming endlessly through their gates and the fact that, if given enough cake, the princesses will fatten up and become difficult to carry off. They'll lose the extra bulk if they're not kept well-fed.

Each base has several buildings that produce hats. Players start out as weakling Villagers, but when they pick up a hat, they become the class it represents – Worker, Ranger, Warrior, Mage or Priest. All buildings can be upgraded to produce better hats that grant a second ability to each class.

Workers are the most versatile. They can construct defenses and seize weapons, swing their axes as weapons, and when upgraded, they gain small bombs for ranged fighting.

All these features carry over to the second princess-centric game mode, Snatch N Grab, which doesn't allow players to fatten up their captives. Instead, each side has its own princess and tries to kidnap the other team's royalty a set number of times for victory.

There are two play modes the princesses don't participate in. Team Deathmatch has each side trying to win a war of attrition while Invasion revolves around control of the towers scattered around each map.

Combat is chaotic but fun, and defeated fighters fall in a splash of blood (and tiny limbs, sometimes), though the gore can be toned down or turned off.

PICKS AND PANS

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

3 stars

A prequel to 2007's "Call of Juarez," "Bound in Blood" has players guide Ray McCall and his brother Thomas through an Old West adventure. Most levels allow the player to choose between them.

After the McCall brothers desert their Confederate unit to protect their family home, they end up fleeing a vengeful colonel with their youngest brother, a priest in training, before becoming outlaws.

Ray is the tougher one, able to haul around heavy guns and hold a revolver in each hand, kick open doors and throw dynamite. Thomas is quicker – he only uses one gun, but he's suited for ranged and silent attacks, carries knives and can use a lasso to climb to otherwise unreachable areas.

Each brother has his own method of targeting multiple enemies in slow motion for quick takedowns. And whichever sibling is chosen, the other will tag along under computer control (the lack of a cooperative mode is a missed opportunity).

"Bound in Blood" has a pretty robust online mode with a Western-style spread of game types and character classes. The graphics are quite nice, but the mostly brown and gray palette makes it hard to pick out foes against the environments, especially online.

Microsoft Xbox 360, also for Sony PlayStation 3, PC; $59.99 ($49.99 for PC) • Age rating: Mature

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

3 stars

Another set of fiendish puzzles is in store for the professor and his assistant Luke in "Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box." This time around, the pair is trying to solve the death of one of the professor's mentors, who believed he had found the near-mythical Elysian Box, a strange container said to bring death to whoever opens it.

The tale the game tells is interesting and charmingly done, with plenty of spoken lines and odd characters to meet. The bulk of the game is as it was in the first – Layton and Luke solve lots and lots of puzzles in the course of the story; new puzzles can be downloaded each week.

The puzzles range widely in type and difficulty, from trying to determine an apartment's location through clues to figuring out which end of which key opens a lock, to arranging items in a suitcase. Special coins can purchase hints, but beware: Pick the wrong answer and the number of points (called Picarats) earned for solving the puzzle goes down.

Nintendo DS; $29.99 • Age rating: 10-plus

– Justin Hoeger