Avatar the franchise has been billed the second coming of everything, movies, games, merchandising.  Over the last few weeks and months even we have been slowly been led to believe that the Avatar game was something that should be on our radars as gamers.  But now that the smoke has cleared, and the time has come to judge the game beyond what we are being told and shown, it becomes pretty clear that Avatar the game is really nothing special.  While it shows promise in many areas, all of the reasons that we were told Avatar was going to be great from the recent publicity surge, end up being afterthoughts on what could have been a good game but comes up short.

Story

I found it hard to get into the game Avatar, not having any real connection with the characters or any back story, the game is simply hard to really understand.  You are forced to make a lot of inferences as to what is actually going on in the world of Pandora. One thing is for sure, there is a war going on.  But the plot is never really developed as to why.  At nearly the very beginning of the single player campaign, you are asked to pick a side.  Whether you side with the humans or Na’vi is purely a matter of preference.  There is so little back story told, that it truly is a coin flip decision.  Do I want to be blue warrior dude, or human thats about it.  You don’t really have much else to go on.  But that is one good thing to the game eventhough I think it could have been handled a little better.  Is the ability to play what story there is from either perspective.

One thing that doesn’t change is the main character.  Ryder, the protagonist of the story whether you choose to play as Ryder the Human soldier, or Ryder the Na’vi warrior.  In the onset of the game you learn that Ryder has the ability to morph into a Na’vi allowing him to take the form of the native species to Pandora.  As the game progresses some parts of the story are relayed to you through cutscenes and dialog with major characters on either side, but no real emotion is ever conveyed.  And frankly, you never really give a shit what happens, or at least I didn’t.  The storytelling is sub par, and does little to nothing to engage the you the gamer. For all of the original intellectual property from the movie to given to Ubi-soft to create a game sounds like someone is fibbing.  Either that was just buzz talk, or both the story from Avatar the movie and Avatar the game are non-existent.  We understand though it’s tough to create original content for a 15 hour game out of a two hour movie, but if you are also gonna budget millions of dollars into advertising I’m sure someone could have come up with some original Cameron approved content that would have helped the story along in this title.

2/5

Gameplay/Controls

Barebones Avatar is not bad.  Just as a shooter or a hack and slasher its ok.  It’s tough going up against the type of competition that Avatar is going up against this holiday season, but they could have pushed it back just like everyone else if they didn’t want to be judged accordingly.  There is just not enough time in a gamers life to play a substandard game when there are plenty of other titles (better titles) waiting to be played.  That being said, the game gets old fast.  Regardless of what faction you choose to side with.  The game extends itself much too far into stupid, mundane, and unexciting tasks.  You expect big budget, special effects, and fighting, and instead you go searching for herbs.  I mean the game is literally littered with crap sequences that you think are going to build into something bigger and more spectacular and never really do.  Sure there are some cool sequences but none really capture the feeling of the trailers you may have watched and certainly don’t capture the essence of movie trailers.  You will basically be navigating from checkpoint to checkpoint throughout the Jungles of Pandora, with little variation on the tasks.  I expected much more, given the tone from the developers.  There was very little innovation in the gameplay department.  The gameplay is split up between fighting sequences and tasks, and I’m sad to say that the controls don’t neccessarily help this along at all.  Between the actual controls of the character and the odd camera angles most quests or fighting sequences become more of a trial and error.  Some quests will require a bit of exploration on a vertically tiered board, and sadly I plummeted to my death…often.   There is also the sense that you can go anywhere and traverse many terrains especially with the Na’vi but jumping on specific rock clusters landed me into a never ending  jump which continued until I restarted the level from the start menu.  It wasn’t that bad as I only lost minimal progress, but after the third time in different locations it became a tad annoying. The gameplay was fairly unoriginal, repetitive, but not extraordinarly bad.

The bread and butter of the game I thought was the fighting sequences, although flawed there was some fun to be had in playing them.  The AI made some sequences hard in a good way, and was a nice change of pace from the menial tasks I had been doing for hours.  Again, though some of these sequnces were hard purely because of the controls.  You have access to special moves which you can pull off endlessly once they recharge, and also have access to different types of weapons.  Camera angles also made some of the fighting sequnces difficult but for the most part was tolerable. What should have been the best part of the game are the massive vehicles/beasts, but for some reason (controls)  they are not.  They just didn’t feel smooth enough to be good.  They were more work than they were worth just to control the damn things. Riding a giant beast that can attack soldiers on foot should be fun not tedious and frustrating.    Overall, far from greatness the controls in Avatar could have been polished a little more and the camera angles certainly needed work, and for a game that has so much development time according to the recent press releases it seems these things wouldn’t have been overlooked.

2.5/5

Presentation

Hands down, Avatar’s best qualities lie in its graphics.  The large sprawling world of pandora is really teaming with life and death.  Small skirmishes take place all over the world giving it a feeling (albeit it a small one) that there is a conflict taking place on the planet.  But despite the conflict Pandora is a beautiful scene.  From the lavish jungles to technicolor caverns there are some definite moments in the game where you appreciate the art direction of it all.  But all the real hype was in the games optimization for 3D technology.  For the three of you on earth who actually own a 3D television, congratualtions you just got your first next gen experience.  For the rest of us, this 3d technology is rather a mute point.  Not to worry though, its standard high definition incarnate is still pretty much on par with what the 360 has been shown to be capable of.  It’s nothing special really, there were only moments where I thought Avatar was actually as good as promised graphically, and those moments were few and far between the 15hour or so campaign.

The overall sound presentation of the game isn’t bad.  There is a strong beat to the game, that is comparable to an action sequence building up to each battle.  Like any good movie…err…game it does a good job of setting the mood with its music.  Alot of the story is told through cutscenes, and I didn’t get much from them.  The voice acting was best described as bland and did little to greaten thevalue of the experience as a whole.

3.5/5

Multiplayer

Included in the Avatar package and also highly boasted is the 16player multiplayer features, which include your standard game types of Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Capture and Hold, King of the Hill, and a Final Battle.  The problem with the multiplayer no matter what game mode that you play is that the fighting controls are not nearly polished enough to deliver a fun and balanced experience.  It shows some promise but with the controls as such the multiplayer is a more a novelty than a feature to brag about.  There was nothing new, and never before seen here either.  It felt like just another tacked on MP experience that probably could have been left out of the game completely and not been missed.

Overall,

It’s not that Avatar is a bad game, I have played some real stinkers in my days, and Avatar can’t really be considered bad.  It just was boring, and uninvolving.  During my playthroughs of both sides of the campaign, it really felt like a task more than fun.  With so many tedious tasks to perform to complete the main story, I guess much of what could have made Avatar a good game gets lost.  Plus, it doesn’t really help that the game was billed as something “special” and the inevitable letdown that occurs when it in fact is not, is somewhat deflating to the experience.  I know the developers want to sell games, but in the case of Avatar they should have just kept their mouths shut, it makes everyone more critical of a title when it doesn’t deliver on its promises.

Gallery

Achievements (via xbox360achievements.org)

+15 Secret Achievements for 450 pts.