Avatar: The Game Preview [360/PS3]

14 Oct 2009 at 10:38:26 by John Robertson

Movie games aren't good, right? Aren't they those things that everyone always goes on about being cheap, soulless products that serve no purpose other than to act as an expensive piece of merchandising for whatever movie they're tied to? Well, apparently not. Not if one Mr. James Cameron has anything to say about it.

I wonder what a videogame from the man that brought us Titanic would be like? It would probably have a remarkably hefty budget, it would be most likely be related to one of his films in some way and it would almost certainly have his name included in the title. And so such a thing has come to pass, such a thing is James Cameron's Avatar The Game.

Set prior to the events of the movie, the story behind the game goes a little something like this. An all powerful, human-lead interstellar mega-conglomerate, the RDA Corporation, have singled-out the planet of Pandora as a good place to set up a large-scale mining operation - due to an abundance of the valuable mineral ‘unobtainium' (the subtlety is just wonderful, isn't it?). However, Pandora's native population, the Na'Vi, don't take to kindly to the attempted plundering of their world and fight back against their technologically superior visitors.

If there's one thing that immediately strikes you about Avatar, it's the visuals. The production values are of the highest standard, the world looking vibrant and colourful at every juncture. Our time was wholly spent in a jungle environment teeming with life, both flora and fauna. The density of the trees and shrubs present you with an air of claustrophobia throughout, their vivid colours merging into something that wouldn't look out of place draped over the shoulders of some new-age hippy. Add to that a few imposingly tall waterfalls and a selection of rather odd looking carnivorous plants and you've got a pretty impressive world in which to build a game. And that's just the daytime.

Pandora by night is a markedly different place than Pandora by day. The bright colours that characterised the jungle during sunlight hours replaced by glowing, fluorescent hues of blue, materialising from the planet's plants and animals. It looks very impressive, creating a nice juxtaposition between the muted, calmer tones of the night and the brash assault of colour that characterises the day. Avatar also has support for two kinds of 3D, the bad kind with the red and blue glasses as well as the good kind that uses the tinted, polarising glasses. Having got hands-on with the good kind of 3D tech (the one requiring a 3D TV), trust me when I say it looks stunning. Everything has a much greater visual impact because it does, at times, really feel as though the world is moving around you. Whether or not it's worth the steep investment required for a compatible TV is purely dependent on whether you're the kind of person who regularly flies to the Seychelles in their private jet for a ‘weekend getaway', but it's undoubtedly impressive nonetheless.

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