Except, of late, we have begun to wonder whether this once plentiful source of gaming inspiration is starting to dry up. Case in point, HAWX. On paper, Ubisoft’s latest author-endorsed military romp ticks all the right boxes: It’s got a wide selection of military hardware to choose from, it’s got a story just on the right side of plausible, and it starts with you killing Mexicans – all staples of a modern Clancy title. But no sooner are you pitched into the first mission than it becomes immediately apparent that the high-altitude airborne antics offered here aren’t the only significant departure from its ground-based stablemates.

Where Clancy games have traditionally always been rich in detail and heavy on tactics, HAWX offers an altogether more arcade-like feel. Rather than trying to blow you away with a dazzling array of features and options, Ubisoft has chosen to keep everything as simple and exciting as possible – even at the expense of outright plausibility. You’re given the option to toggle between two very distinctive control modes – assistance on and assistance off. When the former is engaged, everything remains very simple: You use the triggers to control your speed, the left stick to control the direction your plane’s heading in (with the two bumper buttons used for more delicate corrections) and the right stick to pan the camera about.

Disable these and you enter an extreme handling mode of sorts: The camera switches to a side-on view of your plane, and disables the electronic safety aids controlling your machine. On the plus side, this makes your plane much more agile, allowing you to ‘drift’ it about (as you would a car in a driving game) and perform much tighter manoeuvres than before by manipulating the throttle and brakes, but it also leaves your plane vulnerable to stalling.

Likewise, the missions follow the same over-the-top, thrills-and-spills approach. Rather than giving you primary and secondary objectives and the freedom to pursue them as you see fit, the action is largely scripted and designed to test a certain ability (such as your dog fighting skills, ground attack abilities or the ability to protect a static or moving target); you’re given largely unrealistic payloads of hundreds of missiles, bombs and rockets; and if you get really stuck, you can engage the ERS mode, which gives you a series of light gates to fly through which guide you clear of danger, highlight the optimum path to attack a target, or set you up with a sure-fire air-to-air kill.

But although this is unlikely to win over established Clancy fans and hardcore sim fanatics (assuming any of them own a 360, that is), a series of niggling flaws and imperfections will make it hard for arcade lovers to warm to HAWX, too. Visually, it feels a tad sterile and lifeless, the manner in which the planes move – be that when banking or even the way they judder slightly when flying straight – is a little too uniform and smooth to convince, the plane models themselves look a little too perfect, and the scenery you whizz over looks a little too flat and featureless, even by flight game standards.

Nor does the flow of the missions feel quite right. Although plainly not intended to be realistic, the manner in which new problems are unsubtly flung at you at set points leaves you very aware of how scripted the game’s missions are. And because most of the missions tend to be very particular in their make-up (flying escort for other aircraft, defending important areas, intercepting aircraft, etc), they can feel too rigid. Indeed, until you’ve managed to build up your collection of planes and their corresponding armament packs, you’ll frequently find yourself being forced to go for the recommended aircraft – which does nothing to help free up the overall atmosphere.

But we don’t want to appear too negative here, because the game does have its plus points as well. Those who have an unhealthy obsession with planes will no doubt appreciate the great lengths Ubisoft’s Bucharest studio has gone to recreate them effectively; some of the missions – especially those which see you participate in huge air battles feel suitably epic, and the manner in which you have to deploy certain weapons while under fire adds a welcome degree of challenge. Completing the game – especially on the harder difficulty levels – also presents a sizeable challenge, and even more peripheral features, such as flying around the areas or practicing stunts with the assists off, isn’t without a sense of charm.

Ultimately though, the fact the 360 isn’t short of plane games nowadays (with another wave now on the radar) does pose a bit of a problem – and truth be told, anyone in the market for an enjoyable flight game would be best advised to look at something like Ace Combat 6 first. But if you’ve already consigned Namco’s title to second-line duties, you could do worse than this.