A review by ShadowDragon8685.
A masterpiece of a tech demo, I love it. When's the full game coming?
I bought James Cameron's James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, which surprisingly enough was made by James Cameron in concurrence with James Cameron's Avatar (the movie, which has neither colons nor it's creator's name in the title) on a lark, after I'd recently rented the movie and watched it. I admit, I liked it; after hearing people panning it for about a year, I was prepared not to, and in fact I found the plot a little cliched; too much Last of the Mohicaliens, as a friend so wittily put it. I can't help but think that in the end, the Na'vi are going to wind up painfully learning the Kzinti Lesson and being wiped out from orbit. That said, it was a cool movie, and I kept daydreaming about self-indulgent self-insertion fantasies that are much too immature to bear repeating. After a day or so of this, I bought the game, and a few days later I finally managed to play it.
I bought the game through Steam, and the process was as is usual for Steam, painless, though I detected the malingering scent of a zany Ubisoft DRM scheme which might or might not have been killed by Steam. Spent some time tweaking the options, setting it to DX10 because, hey, I have a brand-new computer with a $500 graphics card, I want to get my money's worth. All the while self-consciously feeling awkward about the whole “I spent $25 on a video game movie” thing, but oh well, I'll get over it. After looking over the control schemes and options some more, I do, in fact, get over it, and work up the nerve to hit “new game.” Bear in mind: I am not much of a multiplayer gamer, and I despise competitive multi-play, so the online features hold no interest to me. I am here purely for an immerse single-player campaign; I've seen the story of Jake Sully's introduction to Pandora and the heart-wrenching emotional turmoil he had to go through and ultimately, the choice he made and it's ramifications. I'm here to go through that again, hopefully with more in the way of being able to take my time and smell the Pandoran flowers.
I can hear your laughter already. Quiet in back; you there, stop laughing. There will be more worthy reasons to laugh at me much later, I assure you!
I move on to character selection; this is nice. In most single-player games, the character you get is pre-wrapped. I was actually fully expecting to take control of Jake Sully for the single-player game, which would have been fine.
(Stop laughing.) Instead, I find that I'm given a choice of twenty-four options: Twelve human males and twelve human females; and their respective Avatar forms. I am at this point very impressed, if only because this is above par for a shooter of any sort. Yes, the most outstanding examples (Mass Effect) let you customize your character a lot more than choosing between twenty-four portraits, but some of the most widely-consumed games of all time (Halo, Half-Life 2) don't even do that much for you.
I don't just choose off-the-cuff. Still being self-conscious about the whole affair, I'm talking with a friend via Steam chat as I look back and forth, this gives me time to look over the characters. They span a wide range of character types and ethnicities; Asian, Caucasian, that racial type which in the U.S. Of A would be described as African-American but of course, in the context of the game cannot be assuredly so since the character might be from Britain, or from the Moon or something. (Actually, it can be described as African-American, since the Pandorapedia in-game later established the character as hailing from California.) Young, old, middle-aged. As I'm looking more closely, I tell that the ethnicity of the human form is obviously reflected in the Avatar body; the lighter the human's skin, the brighter a cerulean shade is the Avatar, whereas the darker-skinned humans range down to near-violet. Features are, of course, reflected in the Avatar portrait shown, and it is absolutely clear that James Cameron put the movie's art direction team at the disposal of the game's designers. I pick a character avatar (pun intended; Female8, if you want to know,) and set off for Pandora.
We pick up James Cameron's Avatar: The Game with a scene of a shuttle swooping low over the Hallelujah mountains inbound to Hell's Gate, and I must say... I am impressed. Obviously, even my Leviathan (system specs will be included if you wish) couldn't possibly hope to render remotely near the level of detail of the movie, but it's abundantly clear that the art direction team was working both jobs and it shows in the faithfulness and beauty of the terrain. The scene pans in to the interior of the shuttle; not quite as cramped as the one Jake Sully arrived on, this one's carrying AMP suits and soldiers, including one at the back on a video screen, talking to a familiar woman with a familiar face. Hi, Doctor Augustine! And it sounds like you're actually voiced by Sigourney Weaver or her voice double, too! There's no way I'll be able to prevent you from dying, is there, even if I show up with an AMP suit to mow the colonel down before he shoots you, is there? Probably not; the good doctor bitches your character out for being another grunt when she's been telling them to send scientists; you complain that you're a signals specialist, and are brushed off. Say goodbye to Dr. Grace Augustine, because this is more or less the last we're going to see of her. We land on Pandora, at Hell's Gate, and an NPC takes us aside after telling the generic grunts to hoof it for the base. She puts us in a car and we drive to a door; she introduces herself as Kendra Midori.
At this point I ask my friend if I should shoot this Kendra pre-emptively (see also: USG Ishimura,) and he tells me to take no chances. I expect a nonstandard game over (or that she'll be invulnerable to damage or something,) but gamely I decide that since my character is carrying her rifle, I'll give a go and shoot this Kendra before she has a chance to stab me in the back, try to steal the ancient alien artifact and leave me to die... Yeah, sorry; I know, this is not Dead Space. Anyway, though my character's rifle is welded to her hand, I can't shoot it. That aggravates me; why does she have a rifle yet? But it's one problem, I can ignore it. Kendra tells me to go inside, and I decide to valiantly stand around on the landing pad exploring my escape menu for awhile.
Woah! What is all this? Experience lists? Equipment lists that are large? It may not be an actual RPG, but it looks like they've got some good RPG elements going on here; and what's this? A Pandorapedia? (This should come as no surprise to you.) I start reading.
James Cameron has done his homework for his Avatar universe, and not only has he done his work, he shows his work. If you're willing to read it, expect a nice long lecture on everything ranging from the nature of superconductivity and the unique properties of Unobtanium. There is also a personnel file listing, which includes the main character and Dr. Augustine. This is the last we'll see of the good Doctor; it also gives us some bio information on the main character, including his/her background in SIGINT, how he/she saved the RDA's asses by exposing an ecoterrorist operation on the pacific coast of North America, how his/her nickname is 'Able' (not that it will come up for a long time, when you find that Na'vi somehow know you as AbleRyder despite your character never having mentioned that nickname to them,) Ryder with a first-name determined by the player which is used for savegame tracking, and how after a few years of retirement from the military, he/she decides for personal reasons which are not divulged to take the RDA up on their offer to fly out to Pandora.
It is not explained why the character joined the Avatar program; not at all. It's just kind of... There, that the character is an Avatar pilot, despite having been recruited for his/her SIGINT skills. It's not explained that he/she was in the same shoes as Jake Sully and had a doctoral twin brother/sister who couldn't make the trip and they got to step in at the last minute; in fact, it's explicitly noted that the character was headhunted for his/her SIGINT skills, not said to be because they had an Avatar that was either going to have an unready pilot or no pilot at all. It's also not explained that the time between the military and joining the RDA was time spent in Avatar training, either. It's just there.
At this point, I've been reading the in-game Pandorapedia for about eighty minutes now. Yes, there really is that much in-depth stuff; it's a good read! My friend quipped about it being a great Pandora Encyclopedia with an annoying shooter minigame, though he's never played it, and that's not really an accurate description.
Having read everything there was to read and explored every menu option, including the rather sweet voice-acted audio diary from the character's perspective, I decide to get on with it. I exit the menu, and encounter a bizarre bug; my character immediately begins sliding across the tarmac like she's wearing frictionless boots and being yanked by a tow-cable. I move, and it stops; well, that was weird, but not bad (it only ever happened once, later, and recovering from it was easy that time, too). It's not like it got stuck and required a restart or anything, so I take a jog around the yard, and holy wow. This really, really does look like being at Hell's Gate from the movie. I make a bee-line for the base and enter. Kendra is talking and I follow her, but get sidetracked when I see a room full of amnio tanks with Avatar bodies inside. I can't help but look around, and I see an icon on the screen to press the “interact” button, and am rewarded with a Pandorapedia article on amnio tanks now available in my escape menu. At this point, my hopes are soaring. (Stop laughing. I can hear you.)
Going where I'm supposed to go, I find myself in the Ops Center; wow. This really is amazing, but wait. I check back – who am I supposed to talk to? I'm expecting Dr. Grace Augustine, but no. It's some other guy; well, I can accept that. She can't be the only person with some clout in the Avatar program, and it's entirely possible she's in her Avatar or getting a shower or something at the time. But what's this? This guy with an eminently forgettable name is said to be the head of the Avatar program; The Head. Now wait a minute – isn't that Dr. Augustine? Why did I get to see her in the intro if she wasn't going to be here? What the...
Okay, whatever. I'm told to get into the pod, vaguely noticing that every time I bounce from a person to a person, I'm getting some large amount of XP for my troubles. I'm told to climb into the pod; what, already? Wait, when do I get my Quarich Speech? Maybe they just need to test my link now or something, so I get in, and we get a recap of Jake's avatar introduction, only with less foot fetish... And it's a pure cut-scene, instead of being given a chance to disobey instructions and run outside like Jake or be a good boy/girl, the character just sits back down, and... Unplugs? Yep. No “touch your thumbs to your fingers” diagnostics, no test, just “plug in. Works? Good, jack out again. Got more meet and greets for you.”
I'm told by the guy standing next to me to go talk to Officer Midori (Kendra,) who is across the room. I do so, and it gives me a big chunk of XP, and she tells me to go talk to Falco. Okay, so... I'm told Falco's up on the main control room, which is also faithfully reproduced. Once again, it looks just like the scene from the movie, so where's this Falco guy? I run around the control tower the whole distance, and I find him behind a desk with a suspiciously familiar floating chunk of Unobtanium. He tells me that my job here is to uncover a mole in the Avatar program, who has been feeding RDA information to the Na'vi.
What.
No seriously, what? What in Eywa's name could any information anybody at a time before the initiation of hostilities give the Na'vi, that they would (a) care about or (b) have any hope of acting upon? My brain hurts, and then I get cut loose from this cutscene to have a look around; yes, my sneaking suspicion was right. This is Parker's Office, but Parker is nowhere to be seen; nor is Colonel Quarich, for that matter.
What happened? Did the stars all refuse to let their likenesses and their character's names be used for the video game's characters or something? It's not even like they necessarily had to do the voice-acting or something, but what the frell is going on here? We saw Dr. Augustine on the flight down, but other than her entry in the game encyclopedia she's nowhere to be seen, with some no-name in her place. This “Falco” twat seems to be occupying the role (and office) of both Parker and Quarich, for no discernible reason. Urgh, this is annoying.
Deflated somewhat, I forge on, and get my marching orders; or rather, flying orders. I'm to find a pilot and fly out to a place called Blue Lagoon, but unofficially known as The Park, because they've fenced it all in. I find the pilot out on the pad I came in from, and get to flying.
I land at The Park wearing body armor and armed to the teeth with a pair of useless pistols, a shotgun which is godlike until you run out when you need to shoot, a long rifle which fires a three round burst, and the really good weapon; the assault rifle. It also turns out that since I got the $25 steam pack (at least, I presume that's why I have it,) most of these weapons have alternative models and skins with exactly the same stats. The very first thing I'm told to do is man a turret, because viperwolves have gotten into the perimeter and are attacking this inner fence
What the hell? This place looks like a Southeast Asian warzone, if the insurgency consists of kamikaze killbeast dogs the size of a Great Dane and speed of a panther. I run up to the gate where soldiers are trying to retreat back, give covering fire with my shotgun and machine gun before I think “oh yeah, I should be up in the turret,” climb up into the turret to waste some more viperwolves, then climb back down and waste the rest with my assault rifle.
Wow, talk about a hell of an introduction. No “Welcome to Pandora” bits, no “exploring the world” bits, no time in the Avatar Compound meeting the others and learning the primary controls and ways of interacting with that obstacle course, or getting to walk around talking to random people. A more or less linear bounce from NPC to NPC then it's straight into a turret gun for a full-on viperwolf attack that makes the pack that attacked Jake look small. (Of course, he didn't have a machine gun at the time, too.)
That more or less sets the tone of the game right there; this game is pretty. No, check that; it's beautiful. Walk around any level, and it's clear that this is Pandora, in a richly beautiful and environmentally stunning sense. But it's so rushed by you, it's less like getting the Grand Tour and more like the Tour de Force. In terms of the amount of time spent from when you start controlling your character until being flung into this pitched firefight, you've got maybe ten minutes of time, five of which is the time spent running from point A to point B, and five of which is listening to NPCs you don't recognize and don't care about prattle on about your next objective which consists of walking down a hallway and pressing F on somebody.
The worst part is that it's abundantly obvious that they laid the groundwork for something much greater; questgivers, zone maps, a world map you can fly to with a pilot and which has names and active quests indicators? That smells a lot like an RPG, or at least a shooter with serious RPG elements, but the storyline isn't there. It's... Imagine if a fan-team made a Pandora mod for Half-Life 2, only they had the full grunt backing of James Cameron in terms of art assets and programmers and full access to all of his universe notes... But still didn't have that much in terms of time or people to do things like voice-acting (what there is is excellent, except for the times when some NPCs refer to your character with incorrect gender pronouns,) and were for some reason absolutely phobic about using recognizable NPCs.
Anyway, I do a few missions as a human; I rescue a kid who's been told to do something SIGINT-y that he has no idea how to do and is pinned down by viperwolves, then do his job for him (which consists of setting up a beacon,) take a speedboat to some holes in the fence which I plug by reactivating the sonic thumpers repelling the wildlife that had been sabotaged (yes, sabotaged,) and I get told to go get into my Avatar. Conveniently enough, both my Avatar body and a mobile trailer with my link rig have been brought here; they must've been flown in when Kendra was, somehow miraculously teleported in ahead of me.
I get into my Avatar Body, and – woah. This is awesome. I'm down to one weapon – a machine gun with infinite ammunition, wearing RDA clothes with a backpack, and holy hell does this feel good to drive. Even the voice actor gets spared a rare moment of non-plot-exposition characterization, laughing at Kendra and saying she's tiny when it's revealed that Kendra, who was as tall as you as a human, now comes up to just above your waist.
You don't realize just how big the Avatars are in the movie; the camera angles always mess with it. Now you can leap over the human, when before the human character form couldn't do much more than jump over a small log. Instead of a weak jump and a boringly practical dive-and-roll, now you can leap reasonably high, and the dodge move is now an athletic cartwheel thing. You'll be amazed at how mobile it feels...
And back to doing missions. Get told to report to Dr. Rene Harper. He's at another camp in the same zone, and yes, he's in his Avatar. He rather ominously tells you that you'll either be the best of friends or the worst of enemies (nope, no hint of foreshadowing here, none whatsoever), and tells you to go talk to someone else for info; that someone gives you an easy-peasy job of running to an abandoned site and collecting flower samples. Turns out these flowers would be hostile, spraying needles or poison at you, if you were human, but they leave the Avatar body alone. When you shoot a viperwolf for the first time as an Avatar, it'll tell you that the Pandoran flora and fauna is only very hostile to humans, and inoffensive to Na'vi and Avatars, which is why it's not giving you any XP anymore when you shoot them. Since it was trying to eat a human's bollocks off at the time and I had an infinite ammo machine gun, I didn't mind; then of course, it transpires that those “inoffensive” viper wolves will still try to eat you, so you get back into the habit of gunning them down before they aggro you.
It looks fun at this point – running around as an avatar with a machine gun, fighting side-by-side with humans against undeniable attempts of violence against them by nonsapient fauna. Okay, looking good. Then, when I finish collecting the plant samples, I get to meet a Na'vi, Tan Jala. Even here they're not using recognizable NPCs, though perhaps it's more forgivable, what isn't is that not only is it not a Na'vi we know, it's not even the Omitakaya Tribe; it's some random asspull Tipani Tribe. I get instructed to cull some beasts which the “sky-people” have conveniently made sick. Nevermind that Pandoran biology should probably be so damn hostile to any bacteria from Earth that it would just give up the ghost immediately, nevermind any questions of how or why, nope; sky-people made 'em sick. Dreamwalker, go gun them down. The character asks him how he speaks English; it turns out ReneHarper was the one teaching them English. Again, what the fuck? Did they have just enough money to get one character model and one scene out of Sigourney Weaver before they blew most of the game's budget or something?
These things look BIG and MEAN when I find them, but they don't aggro me immediately, so I take the opportunity to get smart and shoot them down from atop a parked bulldozer (not one of the mega remote-operated bulldozers, a smaller dozer with an empty cab) and a pipeline which for some reason emerges from the ground for a few meters and then goes back into it.
Then an airstrike hits almost on top of me; I get told to report to Falco, the smug bastard, who's here in the zone. He tells me Dr. Harper is the mole and I need to chase down his Avatar. Why they don't just unplug him then and there is beyond me, but chase him down I do; I find him outside the bombed-out Navi camp, being told how he's decided to “side with” the Na'vi (despite all the logical reasons that makes no sense whatsoever, not the least of all the question of why wouldn't they just unplug him, let alone any questions of how the Na'vi intend to fight them off,) and he implores you to join him. Then Falco shows up with some bully-boys and a Samson which has rocket pods, and tells me to shoot Dr. Harper.
Then I get control of my character back, and it's pretty obvious this is the Big Choice. Wait, what? Just like that? The build-up from the time when you know the choice is coming to making it has taken approximately two hundred and forty seconds, what with the Doctor imploring me to help him take on the troops, and Falco ordering me to shoot the Doctor... And none of them seem to be ready to do anything without waiting on my decision.
There doesn't seem to be any option to try and be a voice of reason, or to implore everyone to be calm and there's no need for violence. Just a choice to gun down Dr. Rene's Avatar, or gun down the troops here to gun him down.
The Samson is hovering, by the way. Logically, this makes no sense; if we turn on the troops and shoot them down, the Samson should just blow us to smithereens with it's mounted guns and rocket pods, but what the hell; I decide to side with the doctor since, after all, Falco did just wipe out a village of natives for no good reason whatsoever. Seriously, it's not like this place is even a mining camp, it's a nature preserve behind electrified fence! It's like Jurassic Park: Pandora, thus making Falco the guy who bombed the visitor center for no discernible reason.
So we shoot down the two mooks; Falco proves to be tough, but he's no match for my elite spin-jump-behind-a-rock-and-regenerate-my-health tactic; but he survives anyway... And just like that, I'm told to jump on a direhorse and ride, because we're in the shit now.
I think this is a good summary of the game thus-far. It's possibly taken you longer to read about it by this point that it's taken me to do the actual gameplay. There's no stop-and-smell-the-roses, there's no build-up to the mess and the breaking point. You're just thrown gun-first into it; we arrive at the Halleluiah Mountains (somehow, despite being on Dire Horse and the Park being nowhere near them) and Dr. Harper is talking about it as if this was a fast journey; then he says that he's going to go with some Na'vi to steal away their Avatar trailers before they get unplugged and end the insurrection we've just started with a bang. I'm sorry, insurrection? I mean war; this zone is in a state of war. When you get control of your character back, the game acts as if no time at all has passed, but he/she is now wearing full tribal gear (which I waste no time at all in changing back to my RDA clothes) and armed to the teeth with a bow, a pair of curved longswords and a blade-staff, oh and your machine gun has been upgraded to the Mk.2 model. I want my Mk.1 back. The Mk.2 has better damage and looks somewhat cooler, but the Mk.1 had the distinct advantage of a bottomless magazine, which the Mk.2 does not. You'll figure this out around the time you try to machine-gun down some troops from long distance and hear the sound of the magazine running dry. Only one magazine, too, so you could well be in deep kimchee without realizing it unless you're fast to switch to another weapon and good enough to learn to use it on the fly.
The best way to describe it is that they built the assets for a much longer game than they actually have story for, so they rush you through it. Your first quest among the Na'vi is to earn the tribal leader's trust by getting a rare flower for him that his mate recommends. This “rare” flower grows within sight of the camp; I took a wrong-turn on my way back and stumbled into the middle of a full-on RDA vs. Na'vi war, where I learn two things: 1, my character apparently spent his/her youth as an expert bow-hunter, judging by the amazing and instant accuracy, and 2: guns hurt. I'm thinking the difficulty took a huge spike up owing to how fast the humans are killing me, and I soon fall back on actual psuedo-insurgency tactics of hit-and-run, using the ability to cloak to run up behind a group of humans and blade-dance them to death before they know they're in trouble, and so forth and so on; later I learn that my ass is being kicked so hard because the RDA Avatar clothes have godawful defense and vitality stats, whereas the tribal clothes, which though it looks like a leather bikini and a bunch of beads, is sufficiently enchanted as to have the same protective capability of full body armor. This is more or less where it stands; you get an obscene amount of XP for completing sod-easy (and not necessarily so easy) quests, they award you new gear you can access through the menu, and the game rushes you through. It's not that it feels unpolished, because it's quite slick and smooth. Controls are neat and tidy; not so very complicated, but those they have work well and work tightly. The world is beautiful and richly detailed, from the corridors in Hell's Gate which are, as you'd expect, stocked to the gills, including emergency exo-packs and fire extinguishers everywhere, the jungle is magnificent and terror-inducing when you realize you can hear the sound of some viperwolves coming up to take a big meaty chunk out of your thigh but you can't see them in all the foliage, and the canyons are, well, canyon-y and pretty. But everything I really was looking forward to is absent:
There's only one recognizable NPC that I've seen thus far, and she was very nearly “blink and you miss it.” Her appearance is even more jarring when you later realize that where she should be is some other tosser. There's no immersion, the storyline is like a rushed first-draft. It feels like a tech demo that's using the full tech and assets of the finished game, but is not a finished game, but more like a game's outline. Moments that should be crowning capstones of long, arduous journeys leave you asking “wait, it's here already? And that's it?!”
Once in the Iknimaya canyons, after surviving your first fumbling attempts once you realize that the easy zone back there was in fact a tutorial with absolutely nothing pointed out to you, you find squads of RDA marines and Na'vi wandering about, engaging each other though seldom doing much to each other. Combat is slick and tight for the most part, but some flaws are glaring; the advantage a bow has over a rifle is range (you can laugh now.) I don't just mean accuracy, though the bows are very accurate; I mean that a bow-wielding Na'vi or Avatar can stand outside a gun's maximum range; the range at which the bullets simply vanish – and fire back with impunity. It doesn't hurt that depending on how much of the conquest minigame you've done (for damage bonus and critical hit chance) and what level bow you're using, the bow ranges between a one and two shot kill on the most heavily-armored humans. The AI isn't smart enough to realize this range, however, leading to you being able to stand still while three, five, ten men unload futilely in your general direction and you pick them off one-by-one. This will come up fairly often, leading to some battles feeling a bit... Easy. However, others, when you get caught in close quarters, will be devastating to your Avatar. For a shooter, the enemy AI is very good about obeying what enemies can see and what they cannot; for having no crouch, only a run-cloak feature, the game can be played with a very insurrectionist feeling. I hope you like that combat, by the way, because you're going to be seeing a lot of it. One despair-inducing aspect of fighting as an Avatar against the humans, however, is the fact that it's not made clear where in the hell you're supposed to get more ammunition. Unlike the human's pistols (at least during the intro zone,) the Avatar bow does not have infinite ammunition. It can be picked up in small quantities by examining various plants in the field, but there's no guy in the village handing out full reloads. Ironically, it can come down to a point where the only weapon you have ammo for is the machine gun, because the RDA drops it; though you'll almost certainly use it up faster than you get it if you're using it as a primary weapon. Once you start getting better armor and can afford to run through gunfire, you'll just switch to melee as a primary tactic and use the bow to pick guys off opportunistically, instead of dedicatedly.
The quests are about what you'd expect; go here, there and everywhere, collect some bombs, bomb an RDA control tower, climb up Iknimaya, get a Banshee, fly the banshee back through an obstacle course, fly through the mountains and bomb some more towers, then Dragon gunships (plural – wtf?) show up and start attacking the village. Rene Harper, the doctor who initially sided with the Na'vi, tells you they're vulnerable to attacks from above – and to climb. This is baffling, since you just got a Banshee, but you can't apparently land on the Dragons, nor on the platforms above the Dragon that normally you'd have to climb up to, leading to you needing to climb up above them. Then you beat the Dragon, it flies away, a gunship shows up, sights the avatar trailer and bombs it with rockets; you're treated to a lights-out as your Avatar falls unconcious and your character's link pod pops open with him/her writhing.
Cut to: Hometree (yes, Hometree, not the Tree of Souls) occupied by the Tipani Tribe and your character's body and Avatar are lying on an altar; you get told that your character's human body was mortally wounded and you're now a mutant Na'vi with too-small eyes and four digits too many on the hands and feet. Congratulations, the climax of the movie has come that fast and disappointingly; oh, and Dr. Harper didn't survive his transfer attempt. This is mentioned in passing and that's the last we'll hear of him except for a few times when he's mentioned in passing by other NPCs.
From here on out, it's more or less the same; the environments continue to be fantastic; awe-inspiring, even, the combat is hectic and fun, the story is rushed at warp speed, but now it starts to be moderated by repetitive iterations of the same damn quest. At least in the audiologs the main character gives a good impression of just how crazy and rushed everything is. It goes out the back side of “bad” though not through to awful, and comes 'round to “enjoyable, if stupid.” You have to suspend a lot of disbelief – even moreso if you saw and enjoyed the movie than if you didn't – but once you can get over how stupidly rushed everything is, you're in for a fun run-and-gun romp.
Ultimately, if you're looking for a relatively fun run-and-gun (or run-and-arrow) romp between ten foot tall alien indian catpeople and evil human mercenaries with really cool toys, James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, might be worth the $25. Once the main thrust of the story has warped by – welcome to Pandora, here's your Avatar, here's a hackneyed and painfully forced moralistic choice – the game slows down by pushing you into a pattern of going to a zone, collecting three stones, arranging them around a tree by ear, and leaving. Though I've yet to play the RDA path, I expect it's more or less the same mission, just with a different goal for finding them.
The crashing can get to be annoying if it keeps happening to you; average of about less than once per zone, but it was there. The game has a fairly decent paranoid autosave which prevents you from losing TOO much time, but it would've been better without the crashes. It's not as bad as games could get in the heady heyday of Windows 98 when you were well advised to bind quicksave to the middle mouse key and trained yourself to quicksave after literally every firefight, but it can start to grate.
The story was aggravating, only one familiar character is seen and only once at that; this cameo by her is all the more jarring for the stark lack of that character where she should be. Worse is the fact that you're in familiar surroundings, but there's no familiar people there; the Falco twat standing in for both Quaritch and Parker, and later on once you've gotten to the Hometree, some other old wise woman instead of Ney'tri's mother. The plot rushes past you at warp speed then you get stuck down into bog-standard shooter game fetch quests without really even the beneficence of a good boss battle every now and then to break up the fighting with the normal mooks – seriously, the first and only real big-boss-worthy opponent I've seen so far was a pair of remote-controlled bulldozers, and taking them down was as simple as standing in front of them and shooting their reception antenna (a big, radar-looking dish so you could hardly miss) with the crossbow; once. They didn't even shoot back or even have an escort (at all). Puzzles are essentially nonexistent, with only a few of them, usually involving shooting a given exploding puffball plant to bring rocks crashing down on things or free floating rocks to form a convenient and occasional bridge.
The ending, however – at least from the Na'vi choice path – was by far the most egregious. Here there be spoilers!
Spoiler
I was wrong earlier. Now it's the most anti-climactic and disappointing thing in the game. The game has a good, solid fighting engine; polished and well-honed, if not exactly the most featureriffic. They had the groundwork for something much, much greater in place, but for whatever reason failed utterly to deliver the goods.
Disappointing is the best word for this game; cocktease is another. The “welcome to pandora, isn't this cool, we've got some tension going on, try to smooth it out, try to figure out your divided loyalties between being a member of the Avatar science team and being a soldier” stuff is almost literally blink-and-you-miss-it. There's just enough “Aw hell yeah, this is Pandora!” to whet your appetite, then the game goes off on a ridiculous divergent tangent. The plot almost feels like it's a “names have been changed to protect the innocent” sort of thing; if you close your eyes and relax for ten seconds, you can even explain it away as being exactly that, that the entire game is an in-universe game based off the real events that happened during JakeSully's insurrection on Pandora, because that's really the only way to reconcile the utter dearth of story connected to the movie, let alone story all-told. It wouldn't surprise me if the RDA themselves put it out as a way of distancing themselves from the events; blaming it all on a nonexistent Falco asshole who's essentially an expy of the dead Quaritch, and that for whatever reason they decided to use Dr. Grace Augustine's likeness and a spun-together audio clip of her in the intro, but it was too much work to make a full AI doppleganger so they mysteriously have her vanish.
And that's it: my review of James Cameron's James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, by James Cameron. It's a decent enough (though by no means spectacular) shooter-fighter wrapped around a story that's rushed and filled in with three levels of MacGuffin collection. There's no satisfying boss battles, only a few mini-bosses that, I admit, are fairly decent, but needed to be so much more. You get to ride everything once or twice, and only one of them – the Thanator – you really want to ride, because it's the only mount that can attack. You can't use your bow from the back of a Direhorse or the Thanator, only swipe with the Thanator's claws or head. Your Banshee and even Great Toruk, the Last Shadow, are reduced to glorified sky-taxis. Oh, and the Hammerhead Titanothere? You only see a whole one once; dead, at Hometree for some inexplicable reason. You see a couple of skulls laying around buried in the ground every now and then, and some rib-cages large enough that they might belong to one, but it's more or less Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Game-Of-The-Film.
In conclusion, if you're desperate for more Avatar, then you might as well pony up $25 for James Cameron's Avatar: The Game. Don't turn it down if somebody offers it to you free out of the blue, either, but otherwise save your money for something with more meat to it. It's high-gloss, but painfully regrettably low-substance.
