James Cameron’s Avatar : The Game (PS3) Review

A BrutalGamer.com review.

Oh this is such a disappointing end for this game.  After our hands-on at EuroExpo we had moderate hopes for this title.  Looking and playing like a blend of Gears of War meets Halo this seemed like an OK movie tie-in.  Sadly so much has gone wrong in such a short space of time.  Still, let us not write it off before we have discussed it as Avatar does have many great features.

Avatar takes place on a moon called Pandora, and it offers a prequel story to partner the movie delving in to Pandora’s past. Pandora is the place if you want to harvest unobtanium, the most precious mineral in the universe. Pandora is the home to some hostile local inhabitant which include such delights as giant man eating plants plants and the blue dudes from the trailers, the Na’vi.  The Na’vi are an alien race that are none too pleased with people invading their planet and plundering it’s riches. The RDA, a military for hire, have created Avatars, a genetic hybrid between humans and Na’vi that they use to infiltrate the Na’vi and try and negotiate.   Pretty soon the delicate balance is thrown in to upheaval when you are asked to scout several key locations for the RDA.  Pretty soon you much choose to side with your fellow man in the RDA and eradicate the Na’vi uprising, or join with the down trodden Na’vi to take back their planet.

You play a character called Rydar  during the game.  A standard communications grunt sent to the planet to help bring about the down fall of the Na’vi.  This comes as a nasty shock to you I can tell you!  You choose between several models for Ryder that represent both the Human and Na’vi form.  These are pleasant enough but offer little in the way of customisation.  At first glance the graphics can look quiet lush.  The jungle approaches the sort of graphical flare that the first Uncharted managed and the game has plenty going on around the screen.  Then you move… oh dear.  Not only are teh movement mechanics jerky as hell but the frame rate just dips and soars like a drunk Seagull.  OK fair enough you think, maybe teh frame rate needs to take a hit to make the game look good.  Then you walk up to a patch of grass in the jungle and spin around to check for any attacking wolf creatures etc.  It’s at this point you notice something not right.  Was it me or did that patch of grass I am standing gin just slide around me instead of actually rotating?  OH damn !  Tilt that camera up and then rotate it and you will see 2d grass textures that rotate as the camera moves to be always facing the camera!  This is a trick that was used back in the days of early PC 3d games and PS1 games to cheat a gamer in to thinking the environment was truly 3D.  It saves processing power, memory etc.  It has no place in a current gen title.  To see an example in 90%  of games look at a a tree and then rotate around a bit – see it is actually paper thin and not a solid polygon object.  That is the same just it is not set to follow the camera.  Couple this shockingly bad use of old coding techniques with the repetition of environments and piss poor frame rate and the game stumbles and almost falls at the first hurdle.

Sound wise the game redeems itself nicely.  The score to the game must of come via the movie as it seems odly of a higher grade than the rest of the production put in to the title.  The spot effects are good enough and the voice acting more than passable.  Oh and there is a thirty second cameo from Sigourney Weaver if that’s your thing.

So to the game play.  Oh dear the game play.  There is nothing completely broken about the way the game plays, after all it is just a generic 3rd person shooter in the Red Faction vein of things.  It is just that all that hard design work has been so poorly implemented that the game feels unfinished and rushed in so many places.  The Na’vi and RDA story lines both come in at around 5 or 6 hours dependant on the number of side quests you take on ad that offers a good bit of replay – or at least it would if not for two key points.  Point one, though different in some respects many attributes and game play elements are fundamentally the same no matter which side you pick.  For example the RDA have a chopper for you to fly and the Na’vi uses a weird dragon thing.  They both control the same – similar parallels can be drawn with special abilities and upgrades used throughout the game.  The second point is that the Na’vi campaign is frustratingly hard.  If you stick to RDA then you will have a very average, if a little broken, 3rd person shooter.  Choose Na’vi and you wills pend a lot of time getting torn to shreds by waves of RDA machine gun fire whilst you try and get in close enough to use your melee weapons.  Pointless and frustrating to the point I stopped playing the Na’vi campaign and reloaded the save the game makes at the point of choosing sides.

Whilst we are discussing things that are broken, lets talk about the vehicles.  Oh man this has been the first game to every make me feel queasy.  The camera flings about like a epileptic chicken, coked to it’s beak and riding a whirlwind.  Seriously the camera just swings wildly around the place completely detached from the action.  I presume it is supposed to make you feel like you are “there” in the action but it just makes you feel like getting out and walking.  I ended up purposely making hardly and movements to avoid wanting to puke.  There are several good ideas here and the XP system adds greatly to the mix it is just such a shame so much is janky about the complete package.  To get the most out of the title I would recommend playing through as the RDA as you have a reasonable 3rd person shooter set in the lush Avatar world.  Just don’t expect to really learn anything from this supposed back story adventure as very little is conveyed well in the story – you would learn more about Avatar from reading a movie blog (may I suggest scrambledpixel.com) or watching a trailer.  Each area opens a Conquest mode that basically plays out like a planetary game of Risk – this, as per other elements is just not fully realised and will be discarded pretty much immediately after trying it.

Final Thoughts

When we talked about Avatar and wrote the preview we said it looked solid enough and would probably be a 7 – 8 score kind if game.  We we’re very wrong and not in a good way.  If you can stomach the erratic vehicle camera ad the glitching frame rate then there is a solid enough title underneath that deserved another 3 to 4 months of development and polish time.  The design is sound enough but this game reeks of being shoved out the door to meet the movies deadline and it’s a shame.  The game is not totally broken and it’s not awful, it just never reaches it’s level of potential and can be so frustrating at times.  If you like the movie then pick it up when it becomes cheap after Xmas as at full price in this current games season you have far better titles to choose from – such a shame.

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