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I loathe the paternal, world-policing politics commonly found in Tom Clancy stories, but I have to admit that the Ubisoft-made games bearing the paleoconservative novelist's name rarely disappoint. The Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell franchises are among my favourite military-themed games. Even last fall's Tom Clancy's EndWar, though ultimately dissatisfying, was noteworthy for its bar-raising implementation of voice recognition technology.

In fact, the Clancy brand is the only reason I decided to invest myself in the new air combat game Tom Clancy's HAWX. Even so, I expected to play just a few missions, grow bored, and move on—I don't think I've managed to play any military flying game through to its conclusion since Top Gun for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Surprisingly, I found I didn't want to put down the controller. I played relentlessly for three days, and was sad when the credits eventually began to roll.

Wednesday night action.

The story, which focuses on a trio of American pilots who quit government work for more lucrative jobs in the private military sector, is neither here nor there. The voice acting is excellent, and the notion that mercenary groups are growing in size and power too quickly plays nicely off of current events, but things become a bit ridiculous around the third act when—SPOILER ALERT—a private military company threatens to take over pretty much the whole world.

More appealing is the game's arcade-like action, massive stock of aircraft, and highly eclectic mission set. I found myself defending cities including Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro, trying to keep under a thousand feet to avoid radar detection, performing bombing runs on naval fleets and military outposts, making safe Middle-Eastern oil refineries, and—in a clever tie-in with the Ghost Recon games—protecting special forces on the ground.

What's more, I was given access to more planes than there were missions (players can unlock more than 50 licensed aircraft), including slow moving but powerful bombers, single-winged stealth craft, and speedy, ultra-manoeuvrable fighters geared for air-to-air battles.

Of course, none of this is exactly uncommon in air combat games, but I can't remember the last time I've found the air missions so compelling and had such fun experimenting with the abilities of different digital planes. What's more, HAWX distinguishes itself from its competition by offering a couple of nifty mechanics that I've never seen before.

The first is something Ubisoft's developers have called Enhanced Reality System. In a nutshell, it creates a series of triangular gates on your heads-up display that shows the ideal flight line to, say, manoeuvre behind an enemy plane, or avoid a surface-to-air missile network. Purists might see this as cheating, but I think it's more akin to, say, the networked HUDs worn by the futuristic soldiers in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, which is to say it's merely a technological battle advantage, and one players would be foolish not to make the most of.

The other mechanic is a third-person perspective that results in enhanced piloting control. It provides a cinematic view of the aircraft—you'll be watching your plane from in front, behind, above, and below—that, while somewhat disconcerting at first, ends up empowering players. Entering this mode switches off all of your plane's safety mechanisms—which is to say it can stall much more easily—but it also makes the aircraft far more agile; almost as if it's flying in zero-gravity.

What I'm trying to say—perhaps clumsily, given that I'm no expert in this particular genre of game—is that HAWX feels both fun and fresh; a pair of adjectives I haven't applied to an air combat game in years.

Now if someone could convince Ubisoft to peal off that lucrative Tom Clancy label (which isn't likely, since the French publisher paid an estimated $100 million for it last spring), then maybe I wouldn't feel so guilty for enjoying it.