Avatar
James Cameron's: The
Game is the official video game based on the film, and it takes you deep into
the heart of Pandora.
Bigger doesn't mean better. Developer Ubisoft Montreal
disregarded this mantra when creating James Cameron's Avatar, delivering a
mediocre game loaded with unnecessary padding, rather than a tight and
enjoyable package that could have gotten players excited about the upcoming
film of the same name. In fact, if you're eagerly anticipating the upcoming
Avatar movie, it's probably best that you avoid this bland and overlong
third-person shooter altogether, because there's nothing fantastical or
compelling about its story or characters. That isn't to say that Avatar is all
bad. A branching story featuring two disparate factions makes this a
two-games-in-one experience, so if you like wringing the last drop out of your
$50, the single-player campaign might keep you busy for 15 hours or so.
Unfortunately, while a few of those hours are entertaining, Avatar's action is
too bland and tedious to justify the game's length, and a variety of bugs and
bizarre design elements put a further damper on the fun.
Avatar takes place on the planet Pandora, which the
human-controlled Resources Development Administration (RDA) is stripping of its
resources--much to the dismay of Pandora's indigenous population, the
blue-skinned Na'vi. Meanwhile, the RDA has established a way of transferring a
human's consciousness into an artificially created human/Na'vi hybrid called an
avatar. You play as Ryder, an RDA operative who soon finds himself (or herself,
if you choose a female
persona) in over his head as he discovers the consequences of the RDA's
destructive presence on Pandora. About an hour into the campaign, you'll be
faced with a choice: side with the RDA, or live as an avatar and take your
chances with the Na'vi. Yet no matter which path you meander down, you'll meet
a series of unmemorable characters, played by unexceptional voice actors who
deliver their poorly written lines without a trace of enthusiasm or urgency.
If you go the way of the RDA instead, you won't wield any
melee weapons and will instead shoot your way to victory. You've got a pair of
pistols to get you through if the better guns run out of ammo, but they're all
but useless; luckily, your shotgun, flamethrower, and other weapons seem
appropriately powerful, if not exactly satisfying to use. Enemies that melt
into the background and inconsistent hit detection make it feel like you're
spraying bullets around willy-nilly much of the time, and humanoid enemies are
too stupid to make shooting them exciting. Your foes often will ignore comrades
falling over dead right in front of them, engage harmless creatures and ignore
you as you pick them off, and walk directly into walls and continue to walk in
place. Not that AI characters are the only ones prone to technical weirdness.
You might get stuck in a crevasse while flying a banshee, fall into an
inescapable fissure, or dismount from a direhorse directly into the geometry of
the plant right next to it and be unable to get out.
Avatar's multiplayer modes aren't quite as useless as
Conquest, letting up to 16 players compete in a variety of modes like Team
Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Capture the Flag. The multiplayer suite feel
less like a throwaway than you might expect for a movie tie-in but the factions
play so differently that weird imbalances become quickly apparent. A Na'vi
player can crush an RDA player with a single swipe of his club, while an RDA
player can jump in a mech suit and mow Na'vi down without much fuss. (Though
oddly, the swarm of insects Na'vi players can unleash make short work of those
big hunks of metal.) The factional differences make for some initially
appealing variety, but the disparity is too great--and the basic mechanics too
bland--to support long online sessions. The mechs don't feel heavy enough to
make them fun to pilot, and the cavorting camera renders buggies as
uncomfortable to drive in multiplayer sessions as they are in the campaign.
One
of Avatar's main selling points is its use of 3D technology, so if you own a
display with the right capabilities, you may get a kick out of seeing Avatar
pop out of your screen. Yet even if you're one of the few lucky enough to see
the game this way, no screen yet has the capability of making James Cameron's
Avatar: The Game play any better than it does. It's not a bad game, and
portions of it are competent, if not quite remarkable. But Avatar wears thin
quickly, and the story is too fragile to compensate for the deficiencies
Sunday, January 20, 2013
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