After being in development for close to 15 long years, Avatar, the movie finally saw the light of the day a couple of weeks back. After having smashed all box-office records with Titanic, Avatar happens to be James Cameron’s next movie which all but guaranteed that the hype-wagon will steam-in, full blast. As it goes for any new high-profile Hollywood release nowadays, it is almost mandatory to have a video-game tie-in and so did Avatar, except that, this time around, the game was released earlier than the movie hit the theaters. Did letting gamers scour the make-believe world of Pandora on their PCs and consoles actually work in favor of the movie by generating an even greater buzz? Or the decision to craft a parallel story-line rather than following the one in the movie resulted in Avatar, the game falling flat on its face? Let’s find out.

The first thing that you notice in the game is the gorgeous visuals. Running on the highly realistic Dunia engine (the one that powered FarCry 2), the game brings to life the make-believe world of Pandora in all its glory. Swaying trees, dense jungles, floating mountains, beautiful waterfalls, vertigo inducing heights, you name it and the game has it. The game manages to closely mimic what we got to see of Pandora on the theater screen and that is no mean feat. Infact, if you are the proud owner of certain brand of HD-TV, then you can enable the same 3-D effect in the game as available in the theaters. The best part is that load times are almost negligible; you can travel for miles on end and will hardly see the game pause to load the next region. Ubisoft Montreal has done an awesome job of taking the Dunia engine and crafting Pandora in it.

Smothering the graphics whore in us, we turn our attention towards the story and this is where the game begins to falter. To be truthful, the movie itself has a wafer thin storyline to begin with. While the game could have used that as a base to add more meat to it, instead it chose to go with a new character and a story. Starting five years prior to the movie timeline, you are dropped on Pandora as an army grunt. The first couple of hours of the story ensure that you get to spend enough time as a human being and as an avatar, in form of the genetically engineered N’avis. As soon as you have acclimatized yourself to both the forms, the game throws the choice at you. A predictable turn in the plot places you on the cross-road, either side with RDA, hell bent on mining Pandora for its mineral, Unobtanium, disregarding the N’avi in the process, or side with the blue-skinned, 10 foot tall, peace loving Na’vi and fight of the evil humans.

Once you have made your momentous decision, the story pushes you from one event to another, giving you one random task after the other. It doesn’t help that these tasks really do not have any thing common between them except for go from point A to point B, kill N’avi or RDA soldiers and accomplish the objective. Each task can be triggered off by talking to one of the NPC’s on the map. While the mission objectives remain pretty much the same, whether you play as the N’avi or as RDA, how you play differs. With the RDA, you rely more on weapons while N’avi concentrate on melee combat with the occasional bow and arrows. The game fails to balance this as the RDA weapons emerge winners here owing to the fact that it is much easier to mow down hordes of N’avi with guns and mechs rather than play as N’avi and be forced to get real up-close and personal before you can actually deal some real damage. There is a basic combo system for the N’avi but it doesn’t real go any further than unleashing a special attack after reaching a five combo strike.

Along the way, you gain XP for taking down the enemy and even for shooting random things in the forest. These XP combine to unlock special weapons and power-ups that range from calling an air-strike to fast mobility and even the ability to disappear. Calling these power-ups however is clunky enough for you to ignore them for hours. The long cool-down time before you can use a power again doesn’t really help the case either. The word clunky can also be assigned to the vehicle controls and the accompanying camera angles here. The camera sways all over the place every time you decide to board a vehicle (of which there is quite a good selection). It gets quite a bit tiring after a while after you have manually reset the camera for the umpteenth time. Quite strangely, you can only go up to a certain altitude in the game using the helicopter and that height is lower than the floating rocks; you can only fly around them which really suck.

It is a mixed bag with the sound department here. Quite like the movie, the game also features a great sound track that compliments the luscious visuals that we get to witness on the screen. The orchestral score here is top-notch and gets the job done. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the voice-acting. While Sigoury Weaver and Antonio Giovanni Ribisi voice the same characters that they play in the movie, the voice-acting quality falls flat. With singularly un-inspiring characters, it doesn’t help that the voice-acting doesn’t even try to be above mediocre. Lines are delivered in the worst way possible, as if everyone is just going through the motions, without any interest in what is going around their world. It is a shame that while the music of avatar delivers, it is betrayed by the shoddy voice-acting.

The multiplayer mode of the game seems to be tacked on to the final game as an after-thought. The gameplay is even more unbalanced with the scales tilting heavily in favor of the RDA faction. The same issue dogs the N’avi players here; dodge the incoming lead and get really close to the enemy before you can do anything worthwhile, which in any case, is quite late by then. An issue that slipped a mention earlier was that the hit-detection is shoddy at best. Sometimes you just have to spray bullets before one actually hits something worthy of being hit. Something else that is quite baffling is that why can’t we zoom with our weapons especially when they have a nice, big scope on it?! While the game supports the Xbox 360 controller, the on-screen prompts do not change to show the controller buttons.

Avatar comes out as a mixed bag of sorts. Fans of the movie would love the amount of knowledge the can gain about the world of Pandora from the very exhaustive and detailed Pandorapedia, an in-game store-house of anything and everything that is Pandora. James Cameron has created a fabulous world of Pandora, with its beautiful forests and strange yet fascinating creatures. The game offers the gamers a chance to interact with this world beyond the movie. But for just a casual gamer, this doesn’t translate into the game’s UPS and this is where Avatar as a game fails. Recommended only for the fans of Avatar, the movie.

6.5 / 10
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