We find ourselves on a rope bridge, between two temples of rock, overlooking a tropical river basin. Odd birds screech, waterfalls thunder, and slithery things splash in the shallows below. We leap off, plummet flailingly for two seconds, then spread our wings and glide, soaring through the humid majesty of a weird new land.

Then we stop. Our wings are still spread, but we’ve hit a huge invisible wall. PARP! PARP! PARP! A honking klaxon tells us we’ve run out of flight fuel, and we drop. We try to spread our wings again to break the fall but receive an error message: Flight cooldown time has not expired. We plunge into the water, hit the bottom and stay there. We can’t swim - only walk along the river bed, drowning. We wade about a bit until we run out of health and die.

Aion is a glorious world, well worth visiting, but a prissy game, barely worth playing. What you do in it is tiresomely close to World of Warcraft: deliver messages and slaughter wildlife, sell looted organs to buy a bigger sword, level-up with no choice of skills or stats, then take the preprogrammed flying creature to the next area and repeat. Where you do it is sublimely different, which counts for a lot in an MMORPG, but it doesn’t entirely conceal Aion’s dearth of inspiration.

The most apparent difference is the ability to fly once you reach level ten, but that’s a limited power of limited use, restricted to limited sections of limited zones. Less limited if you pay the extra cash for the Collector’s Edition, which grants you an extra 40 seconds of flight from level 30. Champions Online and City of Heroes are both more liberal with flight and more interesting games besides.

Aion is remarkable for different reasons. For one, the combat features a system of ‘chains’ – skills that can only be activated in a specific order, or when certain conditions are fulfilled. In too many cases it means that after you deal some damage, you can at once deal... some more damage. But sometimes, skills are opened up: every time a Scout dodges, they can use a special counterattack. Other classes can inflict quick hits on enemies who’ve been knocked down, which in theory permits combos with other players. In practice, shiny buttons pop up in combat and you click them hurriedly. Nice, but no revelation.

The greater asset is the exotic world and the creatures in it. While it’s not as large or diverse as Azeroth, Aion’s planet has a slender eastern elegance that WoW’s chunky polygons lack. Its capital cities are utopian explosions of swooping arches and floating spires, and each region has some looming spectacle of vegetation or mammal that marks it out as immediately otherworldly.

The main reason we wanted to play Aion was a screenshot of some amazing elephant things with great long legs standing in a lake. When we finally found them, at level ten, we weren’t allowed to fly near them, gliding to them revealed them to be immaterial, and wading near them drowned us. It’s a game that wants you to admire its scenery, but under no circumstances explore it. Stay on track, kill ten rats, shut up and grind.

In fairness to Aion, there are no rats. The monster designs are unique perversions of reality and fantasy convention, and meeting new ones is the main motivation to progress. So your quests are to kill three adorable panda creatures, six cuddly armadillo dudes, nine baby crabs, ten graceful heron, and rip the hearts out of eleven tiny, smiling, peace-loving mushroom men. To restore the natural order. It’s funny how often that comes up, isn’t it?