Avatar: The Game

Rating: T

Score: 6.5/10

James Cameron is probably laughing his way to the bank right now. Not only was his previous film, Titanic, the highest grossing film of all time, his latest film, Avatar, has made BILLIONS (yes, with a "b", BILLIONS) in a little over two weeks. Yes, today would be an excellent day to be this man. Being this successful, he wants what all business men want: more success. A video game adaptation seems to be a good idea; it earns billions from overall game sales alone, making it even more popular than films and music. So is Avatar: The Game just another bad movie-to-game adaptation, from just another business man trying to gain even more money, or is it one of the few that shines? This game is available for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Nintendo Wii, PSP, Nintendo DS, and iPhone.

The story goes that you are a normal, human mercenary sent to...do random scavenger hunts to prove your worth. Soon afterwards, you'll get the choice of staying with the RDA (the army) or betraying them to join the Na'vi (the natives). If you choose RDA, you'll play the game as a passable third-person shooter. Join the Na'vi, and you'll play the game as a passable third-person action game. Neither are terrible, but neither are quite as enjoyable as other games that feature similar styles.

For both sides of the story, you'll get XP from killing enemies and completing missions. Get enough XP, and you'll level up. With each level up, you'll unlock new weapons and skills. Sometimes, you'll get a useful new weapon, sometimes you won't be so lucky. Some level ups might give you a weapon with the same stats as another weapon you already have, the only difference being purely visual. It may be a different color, or have a scope (which doesn't matter since you can't use scopes).

You can hold four skills at once, and you will become more and more powerful as you level up. Skills include turning invisible and healing yourself. Such skills will be needed when you get desperately outnumbered and/or outgunned. Sometimes you feel you depend on such skills to survive, but when you examine the overall situation, it's only fair: You are one person with a pistol/bow and arrow (and maybe another weapon, but those are your defaults, the slash representing RDA/Na'vi split when talking weapons), and you are pitted against multiple armies in the course of a few minutes. Being able to turn invisible to break through their main defence and throwing up a shield to protect yourself as you gun them down from their weak point: right behind them is essential.

One big flaw is you play completely blind except for your minimap. You can't access a full map without use of a special teleporter station, so you'll need to rely on squinting to see where you need to go and what path to take (they're called "minimaps" for a reason).

You'll spend the whole game doing mission after mission. You'll rarely free roam around, even thought you could argue it's a free roaming game, but almost in the same way Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a free roaming game. Sure, you could adventure around in both games, but there's nothing to see or do, defeating the purpose of having such a big world. You should've just had one simple, linear path to each goal, because that's basically what's going to happen. Plus, I thought "mission-after-mission" kind of games were a little outdated, is Avatar trying to revive them? They’re not worth reviving, those kinds of games died out for a reason, a very good reason.

It's not terrible overall, but it doesn't add anything (or at least it doesn't add much) of new, original sparks of its own. The story is rather dull and uninteresting, the voice action sounds terribly forced at times, and the mission-after-mission style is outdated and boring. On the other hand, it's gameplay is fun overall and can be quite addicting, and it looks great. James Cameron shouldn't take up a career in video game design anytime soon though. Stick to movies.