God my sleep's gone up the creek without a paddle... or even a boat... and there's sharks. Nothing to do with the game mind you, that was fine enough – more likely it's seasonal or the copious amount of wine I forced into my body last night.

Anyhoo, H.A.W.X was probably the first arcade flight sim I'd done in, well, a long time. It had everything I would expect for this type of game: lots of planes, unlocks, decent environments and missions and a burly commander voiced by someone who eats gravel on a regular basis telling me how crashing one of his billion dollar planes was naughty, but I was going to do it anyway. The problem I found was that it did this in abundance.

You play the part of a supposed elite US Airforce pilot who gets made redundant and so heads off to work for a PMC (Private Military Company), taking his 2 trusted wingmen with him. Things take a turn for the worse and soon an all-out war's going on and you're stuck in the middle, dodging missiles and generally trying to stay alive.

H.A.W.X. rewards your efforts after each mission with experience based on how well you've performed during the flight. Completing bonus objectives and being all-round efficient on the level earns you more experience and helps you level up faster. Levelling up gives you access to new planes and load-outs that theoretically help you in the later missions. I say “theoretically” as the game generally tells you which plane and kit to take on each mission and the planes are pretty easy to unlock so you tend to find you just skip over the selection process in the hope that it knows what it's talking about.

It certainly smells more of 'Arcade' that it does 'Simulation', the first real sign of this is how you'll start a level with 200 missiles at your disposal, or the ability to lock onto 4 targets at once. Another point, while perhaps not completely out-of-bounds, is that you can turn off your flight assistant and perform some crazy moves so long as you try not to stall your plane. Which you will. Repetitively.

While H.A.W.X. offers 19 levels of campaign missions to go, most of these are the same style of cut-and-paste design. They look nice enough, and you'd certainly hope so given the immense install time, but if you're looking to fly through canyons and go on sneaky night-time bombing runs then you'll probably need to look elsewhere. Sure, they have a couple, but not something worth a mention. If anything, the game boils down to taking out targets, be that by land, sea or air.

Now, something that they've introduced is a funky-looking console overlay that can be used to guide you to objectives or perform manoeuvres by bringing up a series of triangles to fly through. You'll encounter this in any mission as it can be used to help evade missiles or intercept enemy aircraft. The general problem is that it's a bit hit-and-miss. It can either make any situation you get in extremely easy to overcome or, for example, using it to intercept and aircraft might take you miles away from something you're protecting, leaving you to watch it die.

Co-op is available throughout the campaign and I'd certainly recommend it. The buddy AI you get lumbered with if you don't takes an age to do what's required. They can either defend you or attack your target. In both cases they're not particularly effective, even if they do get to their objective quicker than you'll ever be able to. Besides, it's always that much cooler to head into a level with a mate at your side blowing crap up.

The one big downside I found to the game was how it managed the unlocks. You can unlock a plane for perhaps completing a map or gaining a new level, but the load-outs always unlock for that plane quite a few levels later, by which point you've already got a new plane. I figured this would be good for the replayability factor but was disappointed when I saw that there was no real benefit to completing the game multiple times. You can see the planes that you haven't unlocked yet and none of them shouted “Hey I'm a super plane – don't you want me?”, they simply existed to give you something with each increase in level.

The game looks good and sounds nice enough for a classic Clancy game, but I found I wanted and expected more than H.A.W.X. handed me.