Avatar: The Game

Opening Pandora's box...

Normally, we'd start this review with some obligatory blather about how movie games are always rubbish and that a good one only comes along when the planets are perfectly aligned and the moon turns blue. This time however, we won't insult your intelligence. You all know the score. Most movie games are rubbish. So yes, okay - the first paragraph you've just read turned out to be a futile exercise anyway. Damn.

While James Cameron's Avatar: The Game (to give it it's full title) is - shock! horror! - distinctly not rubbish, it's not exactly a stellar example within its genre, succeeding as little more than a perfectly solid - if somewhat workmanlike - third-person shooter/hack and slasher.

Avatar's problems are not with its core gameplay mechanics - which are actually fine - it's the repetitive missions that all consist of samey fetch and collect errands that begin to grind once you've gathered X number of cell samples only to then be presented with another incredibly similar task that involves locating a rare seed, healing plant, crystal shard or some such. We'll explain more about this later.

Picking up its story two years before the events of what is quite possibly the biggest movie event of the decade, the game's narrative moves at a decent pace and manages to keep you involved despite the overall shortcomings inherent in the rest of the game. That said, the exchanges between your rather generic protagonist and the characters around him can often seem a bit dry, which is obviously of detriment to the rest of the ongoing plot.

Perhaps more damagingly, the movie's Pandoran jungle setting fails to instil the same sense of wonder as its multiplex counterpart, although the level of dense, lush foliage on display is quite impressive and testament to the power of Ubisoft Montreal's Dunia Engine, which was also used to create Far Cry 2's incredible African landscapes. Fundamentally, the visuals work much better in 3D, but to truly appreciate the full stunning effect, you'll need to acquire an expensive 3D TV (roughly 5000 GBP to you, squire).

Visuals aside, Avatar: The Game sketches a prologue to the film following the progress of your human RDA signals specialist, Alec Ryder. It all works rather well, with Ryder beginning at an RDA base in a disguised tutorial section where you get to see first hand how the corporation create their Na'vi avatars before then becoming one yourself.

A game of two divergent halves, upon completion of the first chapter you're confronted with a pivotal choice that ultimately decides which of the two paths you'll take through the narrative. Do you choose to remain an avatar and permanently integrate yourself into Na'vi society or do you stick with the humans and wipe out the natives in a conquest for their precious resources?

Morally, it seems like a no-brainer - the Na'vi are clearly the good guys, the gung-ho RDA invading Pandora and slaughtering anything in their path in the name of mining valuable minerals. Sound familiar at all?

The choice really boils down to whether you'd rather rampage through the jungles destroying plant life and killing anything that moves, versus utilising low-tech weaponry such as bows, melee blades and clubs against the RDA forces and their huge arsenal of machine guns, flamethrowers and bipedal walkers. Again, a no-brainer you might think, but there are pros and cons to each side that make each narrative strand a worthwhile endeavour.

Opting for the RDA path brings with it the obvious advantages of advanced armaments - jeeps, ATVs, Dragon helicopters and so on. But on the flipside, playing as the Na'vi allows you to get up close and personal with your enemies, tearing through squads with deadly speed and agility, as you cut them up with dual blades and staffs much like a hack and slash title. Each class can call upon various special abilities by holding the left bumper and a face button, but the Na'vi arguably have the edge as they can call upon the spirit of the jungle to draw power and execute useful abilities such as temporary invisibility or a quick health boost. The Na'vi also happen to be nine feet tall, so tower over their foes, literally altering the perspective of the game.

Regardless of which class you plump for, the essence of each mission remains much the same nonetheless. Collect this, gather that, collect some more and so on and so forth. Each objective consistently will likely elicit excessive sighs and grumbles due to the severe lack of variation on offer. Killing, collecting and finding stuff does not a good game make and soon grows tired.

Furthermore, what few action set pieces feature in the game are usually damp squibs and are over before they've even begun. Take an attack on a Na'vi village for instance that demands you climb to a high vantage point to leap on top of a hostile Dragon helicopter-type thing. Your task is to repeat the same action three times over in order to destroy it, sending it nose-diving into the ground. There's no time limit imposed, no sense of urgency and no real threat presented by the immense, hovering gunship - just an overriding feeling of frustration as you attempt to leap to the designated point, over and over.

Avatar isn't a bad game by any means; it just isn't a particularly great one. While the gameplay mechanics themselves and indeed the graphics are fairly decent, the entire experience is simply ruined by repetitious tasks. So much so that by the end of the campaign, you'll feel far too jaded to even consider tackling the alternate narrative strand.

There's an apparent effort to make Avatar: The Game so much more than your average movie-based title. RPG elements such as accumulating XP and scanning the environment for entries to your Pandorapedia all add extra depth and longevity, but it's just not quite enough to rescue this from being just slightly above average fare. Even the absorbing Conquest mini-game wears thin after a while, although it is a welcome diversion from the main game.

Avatar is a likeable title, but just a tad too dull to warrant investing too much of your time in completing both of its narrative components. Completists might get a kick out of collecting every last item and Pandorapedia article, but everyone else might find themselves getting very bored, very quickly. Still, as far as movie titles go, you could certainly do a lot worse.

60%

By Richard Walker