When in doubt, battle the undead.

You've always wanted to fight the forces of evil in a medieval fantasy setting. And if your forces included unicorns that shot powerful rainbows from their horns, so much the better.

In Legendary Wars, your team of heroes must explore the world of Legendaria and gather the fabled Sunstones to fight the forces of the Netherworld. And while your scrappy crew may start out with almost nothing going for it, you'll use experience points and treasure earned from each battle to continuously upgrade your units, improving their attack, defense, number of hit points, chances for a critical hit, and so on, eventually unlocking the Legendary Armor needed to defeat the final boss.

There's always a dragon to test your armor's warranty...

The theme sure sounds familiar, but developer Liv Games absolutely keeps things interesting. A blend of well-rendered 2D graphics meets good sound and music with a sense of self-aware humor thrown in. Yes, a combination of humans, elves, and dwarves teaming up to fight evil has been done before (cough, cough Tolkien). The developers play off of this, further escalating the humor to rip into the Twilight series, when both werewolf and vampire "teams" must be fought and destroyed to vanquish evil from the land.

Once the battles begin, you'll have to handle waves of enemies marching towards you in one of three lanes while simultaneously mining jewels with which to hire additional forces on the fly. (Think of the jewels like the suns in Plants Vs Zombies.) Have several vampires approaching? Send a few knights to hold 'em at bay while recruiting several archers to take them out from a safe distance.

A variety of battle types keeps things interesting -- in some cases, you'll be attacking a base, others will have you defending your castle while others will have you gunning to take down a boss. And the story moves along at a good clip without feeling like an afterthought. Perhaps what sells the game the best is the sense that even though you're guiding a continuously growing battle in real time, the controls are quick, responsive, and feel natural within about 30 minutes of gameplay. This, combined with good performance, solid app functionality and a steady framerate, make the game work to the point that you find yourself hankering for just one more battle.

Keep the vampires busy with knights and let the archers do the rest.

If there's one caveat or wish for Legendary Wars, it's this: At times the units overlap themselves and it's hard to tap on a specific unit to tell it what to do. If the next version could let you tap multiple times on a specific unit type (i.e., your elven archers) and command every unit to move to a given location or attack a specific unit, this would be a welcome feature that harkened back to a Myth: The Fallen Lords level of control.

The bottom line. Legendary Wars may not be the iOS port of a best-selling marquee title or feature bleeding-edge graphics that push your device to its very limit, but it makes its mark from being accessible while telling a good story and knowing when to back off and make fun of itself, all of which leaves you wanting to see what happens next. Wrap this up with a 99-cent price tag (for a limited time) and you've got a winner.