Avatar Review

The Na'vi campaign features better combat

Whichever side you choose to fight for, you'll earn XP for every mission you complete and for side missions that you finish while wandering about the various locations. Go beyond an XP marker and you'll be rewarded with upgrade packs, each giving you some goodies to enhance your character. Some will contain new special skills or improved versions of those you've already acquired; others will be upgraded weapons that inflict more damage or have a higher rate of fire; if you're really lucky you'll get new armour. You can customise which of the skills you place in the four quick-access slots, but other that that all this XP levelling up isn't nearly as RPG-like as it might seem. The entire game is incredibly linear and has been designed to give you certain upgrades at more or less the same point as everyone else playing the game.

If you've watched the trailer for the big budget Hollywood movie, you'll have no doubt seen the many wonderfully designed creatures that James Cameron and his team have created. As a Na'vi soldier you get to ride on many of these, on the ground and in the sky, yet the experience isn't nearly as pleasant as it should have been. The main culprits are clunky controls and bad animations. The flying Banshees should be fun, but they handle too much like machines, while the powerful panther-like Thanators move with the grace of a wheelie bin. The RDA doesn't ride animals, but their machines make for the better "vehicle" gameplay. Ground vehicles aren't hugely engaging, but the Scorpion gunship is superb, with a control scheme that suits it perfectly.

I wasn't able to test the game's much-talked about 3D mode (something that impressed at preview events earlier in the year), but Avatar is still a good looking game - let down at points by some inexplicably bad texture work and an erratic frame rate. The world of Pandora, with its dense jungles, bizarre floating rock formations and magical creatures, has been brought to virtual life quite superbly, but there are only so many times you can blindly ignore sequences of gameplay running at a fraction of the desired frame rate, or a six-legged horse animated so robotically that it might as well be animatronic. When you're high in the sky in a Scorpion, gunning down pod dispensers suckled onto sheer cliff faces, with the entire game world seemingly there in front of you, it's a sight to behold, but too many glitches and rough edges let the package down.

Visual quibbles aside, Avatar's main problem stems from the mission variety, or rather the complete lack of it. After some awkwardly-acted cutscenes you're given a location to head to and a fairly mundane objective that usually involves killing enemies and finding an ancient crystal shard. Once completed you return to the person that set you the mission in the first place, who will either dish out another mission or send you to someone else so they can do the same. It's a system that is fairly common in open world games, but Avatar has more in common with a linear stage-based shooter than something like GTA. There's an illusion of openness, but it's all rigidly structured.

But the humans get to fight more interesting enemies

Other distractions include a mini-game called Conquest, in which you command an army as it moves around a Risk-style representation of Pandora, taking control of zones and fighting in stat-based wars. It's a neat addition to the game, but isn't a great deal of fun, even if it rewards you with bonuses to be used during the campaign. There's a full 16-player online multiplayer mode here too, naturally pitting the Na'vi against the RDA soldiers; natives versus hostile forces; nature versus machines. Game modes include the standard Team Deathmatch, as well as Capture the Flag, Capture and Hold, King of the Hill and Final Battle (destroying key enemy tactical points before they destroy yours). At the time of writing I haven't been able to test the multiplayer functionality, but I doubt the gunplay found in the campaign simply is tight enough to translate well to a competitive multiplayer environment.

James Cameron's Avatar: The Game is easily one of the best movie licensed games I've ever played, but at the same time it's not good enough to stand alone as a must-own title. While the presentation is great and the combat generally enjoyable, the missions leave a lot to be desired - and there's little of the sense of wonder that the movie promises. Had the two campaigns been packed with superbly entertaining moments, the missions been more diverse in their structure, and the "vehicles" been more fun to man, then yes, Avatar the Game might have reached the heights its source material looks set to achieve. It's still a great effort, and will go a long way to right the wrongs of publishers down the years, but it seems that even James Cameron's involvement isn't enough to turn a movie into a triple-A video game.