Reviewed by Daniel Rutledge
Avatar is one of the most hyped movies of all time and despite a lot of my mates being naysayers, I am still really excited about it. I was excited about the tie-in game too, despite the fact that around 99 percent of movie tie-in games are rubbish. But the game is a big disappointment. It’s good for a movie tie-in game and it is pretty fun in places, but overall it’s just not good enough.
Coming right after the exceptional Uncharted 2 and Modern Warfare 2, the dramatic elements of Avatar are quite bad. This is a huge letdown, especially considering James Cameron’s name is attached to it. The actors deliver poorly written lines in a kind of non-interested way and a lot of what is said seems totally arbitrary.
The story is pretty cool, but nothing too special in the gaming world. That is to say, I imagine the story would be really, really awesome, if the game was released after the movie, and the movie enters pop culture in the same way James Cameron’s Aliens or Terminator has. But at this stage we don’t know too much about the world of Avatar, just what’s been seen in the trailers etc. Despite this, the game seems to assume that we know a lot – it doesn’t explain factors that kind of should be explained, and it doesn’t treat much with the epic ‘wow’-ness that the movie does (well, appears to). Disregarding the movie, the mythology that the game creates is fairly mediocre compared to those of other gaming titles.
One nice thing storyline-wise is that after an hour or so of gameplay, you get to decide whether you’ll play the rest of the game as a human or a Na’vi alien. This kind of makes it like two separate games in one, but the two are extremely similar. The missions are pretty much the same – go and talk to this character, be annoyed at what they say, go pick up an item on their instruction, maybe have a fight on the way, go back and talk to that character and be annoyed at them again, then go somewhere else. Pretty dull.
That last paragraph sounds pretty cynical and like something that could be said about a lot of other games. But when the storyline is so weak you don’t really care about what you’re doing, it all does feel like generic gameplay you’ve experienced countless times in the past.
It does take quite a while to get through though, and if you play through as both characters and complete the numerous side-tasks, you’ll actually get a lot more gaming hours out of this than a lot of other titles on the market. They won’t be nearly as enjoyable as they would be with those other titles, but still.
So obviously this is an action game and obviously the most important thing is the action itself. It’s not that good. It’s not as disappointing as the narrative aspects, but it’s pretty crappy, especially coming after such an amazing run of games over the last few months. If you play as a human, it’s over-the-shoulder third person shooter fare that involves a lot of running and free-aim or ‘from-the-hip’ shooting, which first-person aficionados are sure to be especially frustrated with. If you’re playing as an alien, then it’s mainly third-person hack n’ slash. This is more unpolished feeling than the human controls. Even third-person fans, if they’ve recently been playing Uncharted 2, are likely to find Avatar’s control system clunky and annoying.
You can often just run past fights if you like. Now normally in a game if I have the opportunity to kill something I do, but I found myself running past enemies in Avatar like a little sissy. Just to speed things up.
You do get to use vehicles in the game quite frequently and despite their often annoying controls, these were some of the most enjoyable sections for me. Using the human army mech-suits was a real thrill, and there was short-lived fun flying around as a Na’vi on a dragon-like winged alien beast.
Oh yeah, Avatar is a 3D game. The problem is, about 0.0005 percent of Kiwis currently own a high-def TV with stereoscopy capabilities. I am not lucky enough to own one myself but am pretty confident that if I did, it wouldn’t lift Avatar into the realm of great games. Still, I really like that they’ve done this, and hope that over the next few years it becomes commonplace and I have a 3D tele.
The flaws in the game are especially surprising considering the developers, Ubisoft Montreal, are the same team behind the likes of the great Assassins Creed II and the Splinter Cell franchise. They had about two years to make the game and presumably a massive budget. So it’s certainly not another rushed out movie tie-in from some bunch of developers you never hear about. The mind really boggles.
Save for a few cool moments and a bit of fun here and there, Avatar is a big let-down. I still hope the movie is awesome and don’t see how it can be as disappointing, especially if seen at IMAX. But if I was heading into a shop to spend some hard-earned cash on a videogame this weekend, there are about ten in the new release section alone that would give me a lot more joy than this. I strongly recommend hiring it before buying it, no matter how pumped you are for Avatar.
James Cameron's Avatar
:: Publisher: Ubisoft
:: Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
:: Format: PlayStation 3
:: Rating: M