Castle defence games (not to be confused with tower defence) involve surviving an onslaught of enemies with dextrous, nimble movements. On the iPhone, flicking your fingers works just as well as using a mouse on the desktop versions - if not better. Chillingo have picked up this new take on the genre, and it's one of the finest examples we've seen to date. Why? Let's break it down.

Part of it's success is the strategic gameplay which not only requires agile finger flicks, but a little tact too. Slamming a knight down onto the ground nets you gold, but to buy the more expensive, powerful upgrades, you'll need to sacrifice too. There's two ways of doing this - a covered shaft leads downwards to Hell, and you can simply drop one enemy in there and wait for it to erupt out as a skeleton - or, you can buy a dragon ritual tower, that sends in the winged creature to devour your victim once he is placed upon the top of the tower. These are not always present onscreen, and so you may have to purchase them from the shop.

The shop will get you all sorts of cool additions - from simple things like doors (a more expensive door equates to more health, and therefore can withstand more enemy barraging), and weapons that you can hurl at the enemy. These include fireballs, giant pillars that you can slam onto knights, boulders, and projectile weapons such as ballistas and freeze guns. Using these upgrades is a lot of fun, but remember that each has a down period whilst they're recharging - so only use them when necessary.

Combining the upgrades with the amount of knights onscreen at once makes for some frantic gameplay - your basic knights will just walk over to the castle and start hammering - then you have mounted knights which speed up when nearing the door, TNT carrying creeps who hurl the explosives at the castle, black knights who wrestle themselves from your grip, and heavy machinery which can be tossed at other knights, or thrown back into another machine to set off a chain reaction of explosions. Picking up a TNT carrier drops the barrel on the floor, detonating often the whole screen depending on how many happen to be there. We haven't even mentioned all the knights here, but doing so would take up more room that necessary. Put simply, there's lots of different enemies which require different techniques to kill.

Campaign mode is the main meat of the game, with 12 different castles to defend - each in their own environment. You have three difficulty settings to play with, but even on easy Knights Onrush is no slouch. We recommend that you finish the game on this setting before you bump up the difficulty level. Elsewhere, there's 'Endless Siege' mode, which throws ever increasing waves of enemies at you, slowly getting more difficult, testing how long you can survive - and 'Madness' which piles enemies at you. Both these modes include local and online leader boards, and they're a good addition.

The real draw here though is the game's excellent presentation. From the bloody decapitation animation, to pinning knights on the sacrificial pole, to the flamethrower, hell gate and stone pillars, the game oozes with style. The attention to detail is very high, and although you won't always have time to take it all in, it's always charming. Same goes with the music and sound effects - medieval themes dominate the game and work very well.

Knights Onrush is a superb iPhone game which is full of character - for 59p it's a great value.

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