A lush environment, tall blue people, a military agenda, plants that want to eat you and a cast full of generic characters. That sounds like a pull quote from a review of the latest movie to make obscene amounts of money, but the above line describes the video game adaptation just as well. Except you’ll probably tack a whole bunch of nasty adjectives on there, like ‘abysmal’ or ‘terrible’. But, in truth, the game deserves neither of those labels. While one cannot truthfully confer a heap of praise on Avatar, neither can it fairly be written off so succinctly and dismissively.<\/p>\n
Ultimately it’s kind of like the film, but with atrocious dialogue (actually, that’s just like the film) and poor camera controls, and you get to skip the hour-long rite of passage montage, opting instead for the far simpler trust-earning ritual of fetching a flower and making a building go boom. Oh, and ammo quite literally grows on trees. And bushes, and shrubs, and vines, and a whole bunch of other creepy looking plants that also like to eat things that aren’t native. This is evolution hard at work – and fast at work too. These arrows are rubbish at the start of the game, but by the end, you can take out a whole freaking gunship with just two.<\/p>\n
Incongruities like those are commonplace in every aspect of the game: the game immediately assumes the player has some familiarity with the avatar concept as well as the politics of the situation, making no effort to rationalise or contextualise most of the events or objectives of the game. Cutscenes feel flat and pointless as a result, which is exacerbated by the fact that the opening 20 minutes consist almost entirely of unjustified conversations leading you from one forgettable NPC to the next, punctuated only by irrationally long loading times, until you finally get dumped into the action. Even worse is how characters deliver their dialogue with as much flair and enthusiasm as an inmate on death-row, and you’ll often feel like an impending execution might just be preferable to listening to the Na’vi characters lurch weakly and unconvincingly through their monosyllabic lines.<\/p>\n
It’s a small blessing, then, that you’ll spend far more time travelling to the location of your next objective or performing some repetitive task, getting you to the meat of the game – the combat. And it’s mostly enough to redeem it of its faults, particularly when playing as the Na’vi who focus mostly on meaty melee combat that remains satisfying for much of the game. The shoddy camera makes it all a little more awkward than it needs to be, but that’s more of a problem for the ranged weapons. This contributes to making combat for the RDA faction weaker and less entertaining than their blue counterpart’s. Most RDA weapons are inaccurate, inconsistent and generally just too similar to each other to warrant switching between them for any reason except ammunition shortage.<\/p>\n
The game also offers a Conquest minigame that can be accessed by visiting any of the teleporters scattered throughout the various locales in the game. Conquest is a fairly well-integrated tactical game that allows you to earn bonuses for the main game. While it also doesn’t make all that much sense and is ultimately unnecessary given that the game is not particularly difficult, Conquest is an interesting diversion to break the tedium of the repetitive quests undertaken in the main game.<\/p>\n
Similarly unnecessary is the presence of an overworld map which belies the linear nature of the game’s progression. There is never any reason to revisit previous areas except for those achievement hunters looking to finish off all of the minor objectives in each region. In fact, the only significant branch in the main quest occurs about an hour in, where your character is offered his choice of allegiance. Conveniently, the game offers a permanent autosave at this point, letting you go back and change your mind if ever you decide you’d rather be pink than blue.<\/p>\n
And that last bit neatly explains what’s ultimately wrong with the game. It doesn’t appear to know what it wants to be and tries to be a lot more than it can. It’s got minigames and huge areas, a library full of superfluous information, fancy 3D features that nobody will ever see because they don’t own $10 000 TVs, but in the end it didn’t focus enough on being a game. It’s a thoroughly average title that could probably have been better than it is and ends up being something you wouldn’t really be proud enough of to plaster your name on it. That’s an honour that should be saved for Peter Jackson’s King Kong, a far better tie-in game that shows both what Ubisoft can do and how things like this really should be done.<\/p>\n
Reviewed on Xbox 360<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n