Avatar: The Game — Is Eye-Bleedingly Beautiful But Is It Just Another Bad Movie Game?
In celebration of the Avatar movie hitting theaters, I have decided to review the Avatar game to see if it lives up to the hype. James Cameron promised a lot when it came to Avatar. Gamers remember his long speech at E3 this year that ate up more time than it ever should have and came with no footage, trailers, or even screen-shots of the new Avatar: The Game. Well, now, a small while before the movie itself comes out, the game has hit our store shelves. Is this the revolutionary videogame that Cameron promised? Is this a shining light of creativity that proves to us that movie based games can actually be good? NO! Not even a little! As I always suspected, this is just another generic third person shooter/action game with a bunch of Avatar characters thrown in to sponge off the movie release.
The game is just so generic it is almost an insult to the Avatar name. It has plain old mission based gameplay where someone gives you an objective and then you, the oh so persistent protagonist, complete said objective. The objectives are all your run of the mill MMO affairs. Kill enough of enemy B. Take item C to drop point D. Kill boss A. Collect enough of item E. Participate in giant war battle F … I need to work on my ABCs … so on so forth, lather, rinse, repeat. We were told the game would feature a branching storyline, and by that Cameron means that the storyline has a, singular, branch in it, which allows you to play either on the side of the humans or the side of the Na’vi. Granted you get to take all the cool weapons and beasties from the movie for a drive, such as the Amp Suit or the Banshee, and you do get your very own Avatar to prance around Pandora with, but aside from the allure of being able to “play the movie” the cool stuff ends there.
You can tell that Avatar was at least trying to innovate. It attempts to integrate RPG elements into shooter/action style gameplay, which makes me want to give them an A for effort. Unfortunately, all the RPG elements are executed badly. Leveling up gives you access to new equipment and abilities, but nothing else. There is no real stat system, so basically the only thing that leveling does, is replace the need to pick up dropped guns from corpses like we do in every other shooter. Your special abilities have a recharge time, a lot like spells and abilities would have in an MMO, however the game does a poor job of telling you when these abilities are ready, so much of the time you will ignore them in favor of simple weapons, instead of taking your eyes away from the action and risking getting shot in the face 147 times. There are healing and buffing abilities which should, for all intents and purposes, be a great asset on the battlefield. Unfortunately, using these, or any ability for that matter, locks your character in a “using” animation, which basically makes him defenseless. This means that using a healing item in battle will generally lock you in place just long enough to take more damage than you healed, making them utterly useless. The only time you can heal is when you are safe and far away from the action, a point in which you pretty much wouldn’t need the healing anyway.
You get XP through killing enemies, completing side quests, and of course finishing main story missions, but the rewards from normal enemy slaughter and side-quests are small and the rewards for completing story missions are enormous. This makes it nearly impossible to level by any means other than completing the main story. Because of this, your character will pretty much always grow in power at the same rate, whether you are an obsessive completionist gunning for all the little extras the game has to offer, or a quick and dry speed-runner who just wants to follow the main plot to the end. It kind of makes the whole leveling system pointless in the first place. They might as well have given you new abilities at the start of every mission.
The Na’vi and the humans play differently enough, although there is some definite overlap. Most of the plain old healing and buffing abilities, as well as some of the guns, are shared between both races. However, the Na’vi also get a whole cache of melee weapons, bows, and the many varied beasts of Pandora to ride on, while the humans get heavier artillery such as the flamethrower, and plenty of ground and air attack vehicles to play around with. There are also race specific abilities which both sides learn, but these are mostly the ones with long recharge times, and thus will be the ones you use the least. Since so many things are shared (seriously … the Na’vi get to use guns?) it is easy for the Na’vi and human campaigns to feel a bit too similar if you favor using the universal weapons and abilities over the race specific ones. Luckily enough, if you do decide to focus on race differences, the game’s nature does change from a frantic shooter for the humans to a 3-D beat-em up for the Na’vi.
Avatar seems to ignore most of the innovations that the shooting genre has developed over the years. There is no cover system, no lock-on system, no aiming assistance whatsoever. It is all about frantic run and gun battles that test your ability to aim while forcing you to avoid becoming a slice of Pandoran Swiss cheese. This is more often than not frustrating, rather than enjoyable. Though your imperfect human eyes make it seem like enemies take forever to go down, even though you are pumping them full of machine gun rounds, the computer’s perfect digital aim will sap your life in no time flat, making the whole game feel like an uphill battle. This makes the Na’vi melee weapons sound inviting, but the controls are sluggish and the camera doesn’t seem to want to follow the action in a way that lets you see what you are doing (shooting doesn’t have this problem, it is all over the shoulder third person.) Also, the game designers did a good job of recreating the Na’vi desperation you see in the movie, because melee weapons are severely underpowered and half the time they require you to run through a field of bullets just to get in range, and you are usually dead by then.
Of course, when I head old school shooting controls, the first thing I thought of was multiplayer. Modern Warfare has proven that a leveling system can work wonders in a multiplayer arena, and without mission objectives to skyrocket your XP gains, I thought that this would be a good addition to Avatar’s multiplayer modes. Unfortunately, for some stupid reason, the developers have decided to remove leveling form multiplayer all together, instead giving you a bunch of stock characters with preset weapons and abilities … fuck! There are your standard multiplayer shooter modes but you won’t want to play any of them, mostly because of how stupid they all end up being. Ultimate abilities and weapons are so massively overpowered, you will frequently find yourself running away and waiting until your most damaging ability recharges so that you can unleash some mayhem, only to fall back and repeat the process. There is no impetus to get into the thick of battle, and because of this, the action which is normally so frantic almost feels turn based in nature. Then again, there is no impetus to play online whatsoever, considering that there is no leader board or ranking system. If the game isn’t fun playing offline with your friends, it won’t be fun online with faceless anonymous racist assholes either. If you do go online though, you can at least smile at the irony between the normal racist immaturity of online communities and the race aware narrative that Avatar is spinning.
Speaking of narratives, Avatar: The Game really doesn’t have one. OK, well it does have one but it is poorly delivered through vague cut scenes with unbelievable voice acting. Considering the massive budget that Cameron had behind his movie, you would have thought he could splurge for some more A-material in the game. The story of the game is a prequel to the movie, but it is hard to tell that from the game itself. To help clear things up, the game comes with a built in encyclopedia that tells you all about the world of Pandora, as well as its creatures, key players on both the human and Na’vi sides, and important tidbits of the meta-plot. Unfortunately, no one wants to go read an encyclopedia to figure out what the hell is going on. The game almost assumes that you have seen the movie and thus already have a basic understanding of the world, and what is going on. This is dumb, considering THE MOVIE JUST CAME OUT TODAY!
If your TV supports 3-D stereoscopic image projection, and yes we know that is a big if, then Avatar’s 3-D mode is a whole new reason to buy the game. If you have a pair of 3-D glasses lying around, you will be immersed in this game, as you never have been before. The environments are detailed and the game does a good job of making Pandora’s tropical environments absolutely beautiful to look at even in plain old 2-D. However, once you go into 3-D, the whole experience changes. Bullets will go whizzing by your head, rocks will float high in the sky while trees stretch out into the distance. If there is anything that Avatar: The Game succeeds in doing, it is this. Full 3-D gaming may just be the next big graphical revolution.
Now for the kicker … how many of you own a TV that supports 3-D projection? Anyone? Anyone at all? I thought my LCD TV which I hooked up through HDMI cables would be good enough. I was wrong! I had to search far and wide for someone who had a TV capable of 3-D imaging, and who had a pair of 3-D glasses they just happened to hold on to as well. Let’s put it this way, if you aren’t sure if your TV can handle 3-D images, it probably can’t. No matter how revolutionary this mode is, it is simply lost on most of the gaming populace out there. When you admit defeat and choose to play the game with your plain old faulty human eyes, the game becomes a lot less impressive. You start noticing slowdown when lots of stuff is on the screen, and the animation starts to look stiff. You can appreciate the world of Pandora without 3-D glasses, but like the movie, this game is really geared toward the 3-D experience, and thus is really only marketable to people with tons of money to burn.
Avatar: The Game is, in nearly all ways, a disappointment, and this is mostly because of the huge body of hype that was built around it. I can’t even call it a solid game, because it is just so … generic. Cameron and Ubisoft took a generic game engine and painted it with a pretty coating of 3-D Avatar paint. Don’t get me wrong, if you have 3-D glasses, this paint job is eyebleedingly pretty. The fact that Ubisoft was even able to make a full video game in 3-D holds is good news for the future of video game graphics. However, right now, 3-D is still too inaccessible to most of the gaming public to matter. Actually, even if we all could play this game in full 3-D we probably would get bored with it in short order due to its poorly thought out single player campaign and repetitive multiplayer. Avatar proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a good gaming experience is much more than a shiny new graphics engine. In fact, aside from the 3-D experience, the only thing that could serve as an impetus to buy Avatar: The Game, is to find out more about the Avatar universe before the movie comes out. However, now that it has finally hit theaters, it will probably serve you well to simply wait to get your fix of giant blue cat people there.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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