James Cameron's Avatar: The Game

About an hour into James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game (overwrought titles, hmph), you get to choose between the Na’vi and the RDA. This hour has served to introduce you to the verdant jungle world of Pandora, along with a brief on its social dynamics; Na’vi are the tall blue tribal people, putting humans in the “evil white men” role of this allegory.

The choice actually carries a lot of weight: The sense of scale is very different for each species, due to the Na’vi being twice the height of humans. It’s presumably for this reason the developers went to the trouble of making all areas, except the first and last, unique for each species. This dramatically increases the replayability of the game, as you might expect. The game plays as a third person shooter from the human side, or more up close fighting from the Na’vi.

The controls in the game are, unfortunately, frustrating. You start by wishing there were an aim button. Players have more serious issues to contend with; because shooting uses the same button as the accelerator. Why aren’t accelerate and brake on, say, the unused buttons? To add insult to injury, the analogue functionality isn’t used. So when you take off in something that flies, that something will immediately crash into anything in front of you. Moreover, there are zero options for alternate control schemes.

The graphics aren’t without fault either. They’re not bad, in fact lush jungle and military bases are well conveyed. They are, however, incredibly glitchy. Namely, seeing lots of textures fighting for existence in the same space, objects passing through things, or characters standing in mid-air.

Amazingly, the game is actually a lot of fun to play, despite such mis-steps. Why? Well, the Na’vi bow is as effective as a sniper rifle, with the humans dual-wielding pistols for extra badassery. Then there’s riding a six-legged horse creature as a Na’vi, or humans flying a VTOL with machine guns and a rocket launcher. Such a list would be too long to continue, but the Na’vi blades bare mentioning; two viscous looking curved swords that gain a special attack after five successive hits.

Then there are the skills. There are some that are the same between species, like the Predator style cloak that both have, but then there’s calling in an air strike as human or summoning wild animals to fight by your side as a Na’vi.

The levelling does a decent job maintaining a carrot-on-a-stick for you too. Each time you level up, you’ll see some weapons and skills added or improved, but every few levels you’ll see your armour improved as well. None of these simply mean causing or taking more damage, but weapons and armour change appearance as they are improved.

As you progress, the game makes “Conquest” available at fast travel stations, which is basically Risk. You must take over territories, and you can build new troops and various defences in those you own. The weaknesses of Conquest are how easy it is and that it doesn’t affect the world at all. It can, however, confer boosts to armour or damage for your character in the main game.

Perhaps the film is the same, but it’s a bit of a downer that the game doesn’t end with any satisfactory closure. Instead, it elects to go with a fairly weak cliffhanger ending. At least it’s fun until then. So the game lasts maybe 12 hours per play-through, 20 if you’re a card carrying member of the OCD club, and you’ll get two meaningful playthroughs out of it. Oh, and there’s multiplayer too.