James Cameron's Avatar: The Game Review

04 Dec 2009 at 12:54:11 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360)

The vehicle problems would be forgiveable if the on-foot combat was better, but to no-one's huge surprise, it's not. Ranged weapons use a kind of auto-aim within your reticule and generally seem to hit enemies only if the game has decided you're aiming at them, rather than tracking where your shots go. This is far from the most bizarre thing: Na'vi bows appear to be hitscan (as soon as you fire, the game determines whether or not the shot has hit, rather than tracking the projectile itself), meaning that you can headshot someone at a long distance and watch them fly backwards long before the arrow reached them. On the other hand, machine guns – which fire bullets, which are generally what hitscan is used for – don't seem to be. They're still reasonably entertaining to use, at times; blasting a huge group of enemies with your orbital strike skill and then picking off stragglers with a grenade launcher will make you smile, but you never feel like it's you that's aiming. Na'vi players also have the misfortune of a focus on melee weapons, which are extremely powerful but require you to get close to enemies, and when you're fighting against tiny little camouflaged humans with shotguns, that's rarely a good idea for you or your AI cohorts (for that matter, isn't it a bit odd that Na'vi, with bows, can seemingly fight humans, with armour and tanks and grenade launchers, to a standstill? And that they're trying guerilla warfare when they're ten-feet tall and blue, in a green jungle? Oh, that James Cameron.)

Naturally, that doesn't carry across to the human campaign where you can be very easily mobbed by the blue meanies, who will happily stunlock you until you die - not that dying is much of an issue, as you'll either have a recovery item harvested from the corpses of your opponents which will instantly spring you back into action, or you'll be dropped to the last checkpoint. Bizarrely, checkpoints keep all of the progress you made right up until you died – if you were halfway through a mission, you'll still be halfway through when you respawn. The fact that death is no obstacle means that the previously-mentioned tension caused by the beasties outside the bases vanishes, which is probably good, because the heavy respawning means that getting bogged down in fights is utterly pointless.

There's a levelling system in place which upgrades your skills, weapons, and armour, but only armour actually gives you any choice as to equipment as everything else is a straight upgrade (and can be instantly swapped out anyway), and it provides equally little incentive to complete side missions as chances are good that you'll hit maximum level long before the end. Again, it initially seems cool and useful as you unlock new weapon types and skills, but before long you're simply getting slightly better versions of what you had before and the game does little to attempt to disguise it, which takes all the fun out of it.

And then, possibly most disappointing of all, we have the details in the world. For a game based on a movie that's supposedly been in Cameron's head for at least 15 years, there's little in the way of plot depth. There's plenty of info in the game, certainly, but it's all in the Pandorapedia rather than integrated into the gameplay. Want to learn more about how the planet may be sentient? Pandorapedia. Want to know why the humans are on the planet? Pandorapedia. Want to know most things that should probably be told during gameplay? Pandorapedia. Even the writing itself is sub-par, with the Na'vi coming across as an extremely heavy-handed and badly-written metaphor for Native Americans. Referring to humans as “sky people” and having cringe-inducing lines such as, when incapable of crossing a blockade, “They are like the fire that stops the water,” are not things that does them any favours. Oh, and expect to be called “he” if you choose a female player character.

If you ignore my words and decide to buy the game anyway, I urge you to play the Na'vi campaign first. For starters, the appalling writing and melee combat mean that it's probably the worse of the two, so it leaves the better (and I use that word carefully) campaign for later. Secondly, the Na'vi are so unutterably irritating that having spent a campaign taking orders from them, the opportunity to murder thousands of them will cause your heart to skip a beat and also guard you against the ethical problems of raping a planet and murdering the indigenous population occasionally implied in the human campaign.

Or just don't buy the game. One or the other.

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