Depending on your age, it might be difficult to get John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band's "On the Dark Side" out of your head during the entire 30-ish hours it takes to finish King's Bounty: Dark Side. Comparisons to a hit single seem oddly apropos here, given how this turn-based strategizer sticks to your brain. The latest addition to the long-running fantasy franchise is expectedly excellent, thanks to tremendous tactical depth both on the battlefield and with character progression, loads of monsters to command, and a turned-on-its-head story that gives the bad guys a starring role.

The plot is straightforward, although there are significant twists and turns from past King's Bounty games. Here, for the first time, you get to choose your starting race. And those races are a long way from the usual heroic figures you guided before. You choose between a vampire lord, a sultry demoness, and an orc warlord, each of whom has been booted from his or her homeland by white-hatted servants of the light. The writers soft-sell a bit of the evil stuff with explanations about how there always has to be a balance between the light and the dark, and a lot of nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor has been tossed in. (Some translation problems with the text make it hard to take anything too seriously here, in any case.) But the bottom line is that you portray an evil, murderous jerk who turns peasants into zombies for kicks, slaughters enemies for laughs, and seeks out the best people in the land to corrupt for a dark spell that will be used to forge the ultimate anti-good-guy weapon.

The music is even more impressive, and includes everything from operatic choruses to more stereotypical classical tunes, including one piece that sounds like a riff on one of the more memorable sections of The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed. Sound effects are also fitting. Most have been reused from previous King's Bounty games, although the distinctive giggles, gasps, and grunts from creatures continue to give them personality and make every battle sound a little bit different from the last.

King's Bounty: Dark Side broadens the formula that has powered this franchise since the beginning with a gothic storyline, an extensive number of quests, and a ton of troops that can be used in countless ways on the field of combat. This is one of those cases where familiarity and excellence peacefully coexist, and that approach tends to work well whether you're singing about vanished rock stars or gaming with creatures of the night.