Avatar: The Game Impressions

Whether or not James Cameron will wow us with his new Avatar film when it releases on the 18th, Ubisoft eagerly primes to bank on the film’s tremendous hype with their release of Avatar: The Game.  As we wait for the satisfying success or utter disappointment of Cameron’s epic, the game’s demo gives us a free, yet brief glimpse at what we can expect from Avatar’s lush alien world of Pandora.

Starting you at the controls behind the twin rotors of the Samson transport gunship, the demo sets the tone for all of your invasive exploration to come.  Briefly, you can gaze in awe at the sight of Pandora’s iconic (and scientifically impossible) floating rock structures amidst a serene cloudy sky before you must blast them all to smithereens with a lethal mix of bullets, explosions, and hellfire.

Only the bravest warrior would defeat fierce beasts from the safety of a protective bubble.

Known as nothing more than a “grunt” for the human RDA faction, you’re tasked with clearing a path through the lush jungle for a massive invasion force.  And if you’ve wanted nothing more than to blindly follow a mighty, progressive regime, crush that dastardly evil known and feared under the unspeakable name of “the environment,” and fight as the highly unique “space marine” character type, then the RDA grunt is your perfect avatar.

In all seriousness, the game does initially look fun to play, but then ten seconds later you realize that you basically can fly your Samson like a bird in a glass cage.  You’ll have no other choice but to land on the jungle floor, where you’ll then take the grunt through Avatar’s main third-person shooting adventures.  Unsurprisingly, the brimming, colorful alien foliage and environments just don’t seem so captivating when your only mode of interaction with them requires attack.

Some areas certainly look stunning.

Undoubtedly, Avatar’s Dunia graphics engine—the same engine that powered Far Cry 2—renders gorgeous Pandoran environments with a highly dense population of exotic ferns, trees, and lively creatures.  Avatar utilizes DirectX 10, which doesn’t add any visual improvements, but, much like for Far Cry 2, does at least boost rendering performance by about 10 to 15 percent more frames-per-second.  All the colors and details will dazzle you as you take them all at once, especially the luminous glows of the darker, more wooded areas; however, each of the individual objects appear glaringly low-res and poorly detailed when observed closely.  While the world, as a whole, nearly spans that of Far Cry 2’s expansive African landscapes, it carves disappointingly linear, narrow paths with only a few divergent forks that would provide any form of satisfying exploration.

Play Far Cry 2 Avatar and drive African alien dune buggies.

But “satisfying exploration” and “environmental appreciation” are all hippie, liberal pieces of crap anyway.  When you’re the all-important grunt, you just take what’s beautiful, put a few bullets in it, and then watch the experience points fly out.  Yes, when you upgrade your weapons and armor using the RPG elements, you surely represent the hand of progress, civilization, and humanity itself.

Ok, so the game probably won’t work as a metaphor for the arrogance of civilization and the nobility of the savage as well as film will attempt to convey.  And the RPG elements run just as deep.  Destroying countless specimens of rare wildlife racked up hundreds of experience points, but they really amount to very iterative, insignificant stat improvements and little more than palette swaps on the bland, rectangular weapons.

Playing as the Na’vi would look much cooler.

Because the combat hardly rewards your grunt’s painstaking deforestation efforts, you have no real motivation to follow through on orders or take part in the shooting gameplay.  For most of the demo at least, you can just grab an RDA dune buggy and drive past most of the action.  Even in the climactic battle between the RDA and the fierce alien Na’vi tribe, you simply spectate the fight around you; joining the fray might bring you some thrills, but the Na’vi rarely fight you back and often continue attacking other random human troops.

The demo doesn’t showcase it, but the full game apparently does let you control the Na’vi Avatars, as the title would suggest.  If I were to pick up the game, I would likely enjoy the Na’vi aspect far more than the kill-everything-beautiful human side.  Judging from the demo, I think Avatar: The Game will only appeal to me if I like the film, and I’d therefore want to further explore the potentially fascinating alien world.