GameSpy's Take

I had high hopes for Avatar. Sure, it's a movie tie-in, and we've been burned plenty of times with those. But the film looks interesting, and I knew that filmmaker James Cameron was heavily involved in the game's development. So I figured this might be one of those rare occasions when a tie-in bucks the trend thanks to a big budget and an experienced studio. I was looking forward to, at the very least, film-quality dialogue and voice acting, and an entertaining exploration of Pandora's lush setting.

When will I learn?

Though some of the trappings may appear to indicate otherwise, at its heart Avatar is very much a standard third-person shooter. Yes, in the process of shooting up either Na'vi or humans (more on that later), you earn experience points and, ostensibly, level up your character with better gear. But this progression involves no player choice; you trudge through quests until you're interrupted with a notification that you've unlocked new gear, which gets automatically equipped.


And yes, the game features a quest structure that may lead one to believe that it offers more depth than the standard shooter. It does not. These quests are almost universally nothing more than destinations -- places for you to get shot at on the way toward. They also appear to be excuses for the game to ruin what little sense of pacing it has by constantly interrupting the action with needless, unskippable cut-scenes. Or excuses for sending you across half the map simply to report to another character, who often promptly sends you right back where you started from.

And sure, the game includes one -- exactly one -- moment of moral dilemma, in which your character is forced to choose between siding with the armored space marines or the blue-skinned natives. To its credit, Avatar branches sharply at this point, providing essentially two separate games. Both are basically shooters, but one features the straightforward shoot-'em-up gameplay of the well-armed marines, and the other features the slightly more tactical, stealth-focused tactics of the Na'vi. But this choice comes so early in the game, with such little context, that it carries absolutely no emotional weight. It's neat that the choice offers such divergent gameplay, but tragic that you get so little setup.

Lest I give you the wrong impression, Avatar isn't all bad. The variety of gameplay styles between the two factions is one mark in its favor. The setting is another, with its interesting juxtaposition of high and low technology; seeing the Na'vi's flying beasts taking down choppers, for example, never gets old. And the world of Pandora is beautiful, with its almost oppressively lush jungles and eerie floating landscapes.


Trouble is, the game can't pump all that beauty onto the screen without frequent stutters. The Xbox 360 version suffers from awful screen-tearing and a general feeling of sluggishness, and the jittery PlayStation 3 version makes that look good. This is a game that's in love with its own look, to the detriment of...well, just about everything else.

I could go on to tell you about the writing that ranges from laughable to insulting (both to the player and to aboriginal peoples everywhere), the infuriating lack of a zoom or iron-sights feature, or the ill-designed levels that require the player to spend more time staring at the mini-map than at the beautiful environments. I could even tell you about the neat little Risk knock-off of a side game, or the collection-based level objectives that offer a mild incentive to explore -- or at least poke around a little.

But it wouldn't really be worth it, because the basic gameplay of Avatar is so fundamentally flawed that even those few bright spots would only set you up for disappointment. Because, despite the guiding hand of Cameron, Avatar is ultimately just another big-name movie game that doesn't fulfill its early promise.