Avatar: The Last Airbender
THQ Australia cooks up a decent, if rather bland hack-and-slasher.
Published: October 25, 2006
Don't get me wrong, I do understand that this is a game aimed at kids, and thus isn't meant to be some kind of ultra-deep experience with a 100 hour sprawling storyline with multiple plot twists. It's simple, basic combat, and perhaps that's the problem; despite there being more moves, and tons of stuff to equip based on enemy drops and items in stores, it rarely feels like the characters are actually getting any stronger or powerful. It simply feels like it skims the surface of what could have been a really solid hack-and-slash -- and this extends to the treatment of the license too.
It's a shame, too, because the very first in-game cutscene is animated absolutely flawlessly. It's filled with little touches and tons of detail and yet, when the actual game kicks off, much of that feels lost. Heavy dithering abounds, animations feel clipped, and often times there's no real sense of impact from either physical attacks or spells beyond a flashing enemy. The world that was created does a nice job of embodying the four core elements, and there are times when it's beautiful, but too often there's the overwhelming feeling that you're just trudging from point to point to solve quests without actually getting to enjoy the scenery -- mainly because everything's there thematically, but none of the punch of the cutscenes sticks around.
Aurally, things are a little better. You'll often run into townsfolk that share dialogue, and except in the case of some mission cutscenes, most of the dialogue is just a generic greeting while the rest of the text is filled in. Ambient loops throw enough of the Eastern themes of the show, the mixes of thundering percussion or just wide, oval sweeps of just a couple of notes, it helps establish a theme for each place (which is good, since the world is more or less seamless, and you simply walk into a new area. The voice acting is also rather solid, but then it should be given the talent in the TV series.
It's obvious that Avatar isn't your typical cash-in licensed game. The developers, whether limited by time or resources or vision, just couldn't pull things together with the kind of polish that something like this really needed, though. The combat starts to feel dull fairly early on, the menu controls can be perplexing and cumbersome and even though the locales change fairly regularly, the quests and storyline don't really give it all that much oomph.
Boss battles can be incredibly frustrating at times, which contrasts sharply with the rest of the combat, and the overall tone of the game just doesn't quite match the same sort of cheery reverence that the original show offers. Again, it's not a bad game, it's just barely more than average, unfortunately.
