I feeling a little blue…
Here’s a rule for forming a critical opinion on a video game. NEVER attempt to approach it even slightly professionally. When I went to see Avatar purely to give this review a little backbone, I was enthralled by the world James Cameron had created; a delectable visual pantry of sprawling, fluorescent delights, sometimes ruined by a pillock in hyped up sunglasses sitting next to me gnawing on his beard.
As we all know from experience, however, a good film doesn’t necessarily mean a good game will spawn from the creative director’s dark sector of the mind called ‘Marketing’. James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game or Avatar: The Game or Cameron’s Avatar or whatever the bloody hell you want to call it all narrows down to the same tepid tie-in package. Set two years before the events in the film, it places you in the shoes/sandals of a undecided Judas named “Able” Ryder in a bid to determine the short period of fate of the moon Pandora before the films’ opening credits roll.
The main mistake I made was that I decided to play the game only half an hour after I’d watched the film, still in the midst of discussions with my partner over Mise-En-Scene whilst watching Newsnight and sipping on Mochalattechinos all at the same time. It’s a fear that hit me shortly after switching on my Xbox that it would never quite match up to the graphical splendour of the film, and sure enough it’s incredibly easy to cast a critical eye upon the opening gameplay shots. Cast the cinematic source away, however, and Avatar:The Game proves to shine in terms of attentions to detail in the environment.
A slightly more negative aspect from this act of impatience arrived in the form of gameplay mechanics. Shortly after picking to fight as either the steroid driven humans or the primitive Blue Man Group known as Na’vi, the realisation hits you that neither are particularly fun to play as. Staying in the form of a human will leave you as a lumpy mass of muscle, too slow to traverse the cluttered plains. Sure, you get to tear through the wasteland with an armoury of machine guns and rocket launchers but that hardly separates this from any other third-person shooter, and when you start slaying innocent animals and mildly threatening plants to prove just how bad-ass you are, you start to question just how rewarding this experience is going to be.
The Na’vi side of proceedings manages to at least improve the game slightly. Focusing more on mellee combat, it’s always satisfying to give enemies a thorough thwack on the head. Unfortunately, positive capabilities of becoming a Na’vi practically starts and ends there.
If you’re a fan of watching films and then reading its Wikipedia article straight afterwards, then this may be for you.
The ability to play as both factions always sounds good on paper, but feels incredibly cheap when actually executed. Both factions brag special abilities, yet none are unique to either species and are shamelessly copied and pasted with alternative names. Practically all tasks consist of nothing but repetitive combat or grabbing important items shrouded in repetitive combat.
The weight of choosing who to rest your loyalty with is also lessened somewhat by the fact that it really does not alter the story at all. Both teams are scouring the planet for harmonics to create some form of song that will awaken a tree which will form a completely questionable and reason that will just delay the inevitable. My mind flickered in and out during sections actually attempting to progress the plot as the humans rushed through everything with no real depth and-call me racist in terms of lanky feral smurfs-but all the Na’vi look so similar and had names that were clearly made by forming together paragraphs of the Magna Carta that all attention in the matter of plot dissipated amongst a sewer of mediocrity.
In order to break up the gun/tree trunk fights, Risk-esque mini-game ‘Conquest’ has been added, and can be accessed at any time. The mode seems like an odd placement, and it’s simplicity marks it as an RTS that will appeal to obsessive compulsive fans of ‘Colour The Number’ booklets. Taking over territories grants you new minor perks that will help you in battles, but none of it turns the tide for the side you’re fighting for, neither does it affect the story in any way.
With glaring weakness in technical elements of game design, it’s clear that the developers purpose was to expand on the planet of Pandora. Players have the option to scan all the living organisms and flora of the planet to add extensive knowledge to the ‘Pandorapedia’. Becoming a know-it-all about Pandora isn’t entirely necessary, and proves to be only a minor side hobby if anything to appease the fans. However, if you’re a fan of watching films and then reading its Wikipedia article straight afterwards, then this may be for you.
Lack of life in a game riding on the coat-tails of its cinematic brethren is something that should be expected, yet Avatar takes it completely the wrong way and makes the whole experience drags on. More could have been done with the sprawling open-ended locations than to scarcely place repetitive missions and dire fetching item side-quests about the place. It almost seems as if James Cameron created an amazing and expansive world to play in, and gave Ubisoft tiny grains of basic code to pad it out with. It almost feels like you’ve taken a job at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory polishing brass.
Despite the perplexing additions and troublesome impracticalities, they serve to coat the actual ambition of James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game. It’s a shame, seeing as there’s possible depth hidden somewhere around here, that it has attempted to break the typical movie-game tie-in trend that seems to haunt everything. In some regards, in terms of length and lifespan, it even feels as if it was just too ambitious for its own good. Yet even after saying all this, it’s truly done its job well. Listening to Cochrane play through the opening sections, the quote “I really have to see this film.” was mentioned all too frequently. Perhaps it is the loose links in narrative or that to newcomers Pandora is an incredibly intriguing world, but it’s bloody good marketing material, and right now, I even find myself succumbing to it. Go see the film instead.
The Bad: Too long for its own good, Environments squandered by linear missions, Tasks become too dull too quickly
