Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

I don't know. You wait ages for a vertically-scrolling retro shooter featuring a mixture of current aviation technology and fanciful sci-fi elements, then two come along at once.

Where Herocraft’s Eurofighter won praise for its balanced gameplay and thoughtful design earlier in the week, H.A.W.X opts for the throw-everything-at-the screen-and-see-if-it-sticks cluster bomb approach.

Here’s a game that’s bursting with napalm-tinged fireworks, screen-filling smart bombs and breathless canyon runs. Unfortunately, the game’s inherent quality gets somewhat lost in the crossfire.

The plot is unimportant. What it all amounts to is that you have to select one of half-a-dozen or so hi-tech fighter planes, each with a different balance between speed and power, then embark on a globe-spanning campaign of aerial combat and all-round destruction.

As is common for such shooters on mobile, your craft auto-fires by default, leaving you to concentrate on steering your plane between waves of enemy flak and towards the liberally scattered power-ups that appear.

When you need a little more firepower, such as during one of the numerous boss encounters, hitting ‘*’ will release a limited swarm of missiles towards your target. Hitting ‘0’, meanwhile, initiates a similarly limited screen-pulverising smart bomb attack.

We’ve mentioned power-ups already, and these augment your attacks considerably. Standard powerups improve the effectiveness of your front-mounted cannon, whilst missiles provide you with a slow-firing explosive attack to complement your primary weapon.

You can also acquire temporary shields, extra lives and a brief spell of wing-man support.

Even getting destroyed has farther reaching destructive consequences in H.A.W.X, a screen-clearing aerial bombardment preceding each player re-spawn. Often the quickest way to finish off a particularly stubborn boss is to die, which is a little counter-intuitive and can be somewhat anti-climactic.

The questionable design decisions continue with certain sections that feel thoroughly tacked on. Every now and then you’ll come across a sort of spatial challenge whereby the enemies thin out and you have to follow a series of neon arrows through a twisting, narrow canyon (whether natural or man-made).

At various points throughout such runs you’ll enter an odd state of slow-motion, where you have to move your craft into the correct position (or nip over and collect some awkwardly-placed power-ups) before a yellow timer bar runs down.

These sections bear little if any relation to the retro thrills that precede and follow them, and nor do they make any sense within the context of the game’s militaristic fiction. In short, they’re thoroughly superfluous.

The visuals are also something of a mixed bag. As with the gameplay, at times there appears to be too much happening. The backgrounds are beautifully detailed and teaming with life, but this can often be to the detriment of the action.

When things get chaotic - and they often do - it can be a demanding task keeping track of your craft among all the bullets and power-ups and enemy craft (who come at you from the ground, in the air and on top of tall buildings). Add in a lushly detailed jungle or a teaming cityscape and it can be a literal headache keeping track of everything.

H.A.W.X. is by no means a bad game. It’s slick, good looking, fun to play and it does what all decent shooters should do - it gets your heart pumping faster.

It just seems that the developers have thrown a few too many questionable ingredients into the pot, some of which fail to add anything to the core experience.