Game Review: Avatar for Xbox 360

Jbone’s verdict: 6/10

Normally, Games released to coincide with the release of a blockbuster are usually apalling – good Lord, did anyone play Transformers for the Xbox last year?  Bleurgh.  Anyway, because UBISOFT (Rainbow 6, Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia) are behind this one, Avatar is actually very playable. 

Story: You play Ryder a human who can transform into an avatar, a blue alien who loves nature and stuff.  At some point you get conflicted (oh no!), and have to choose one race to fight the other.  Obviously it’s a bit more complicated than that, but I skipped thru a lot of it as it was pretty standard role-playing jibber-jabber.

The graphics aren’t bad, but not really up tot the higher end like Bioshock or Gears or Drakes Fortune 2 on ps3.  The Naa’vi world is pretty beautiful though and the interaction of animals is pretty cool.

There’s a lot of walking around doing doing menial tasks like collecting plant samples – It’s fun, to a point, but there’s probably a bit too much of that- none of the tasks would challenge the brain of an orange.  There is a lot of combat and unfortunately the engine  isn’t very sophisticated and firefights can be frustrating particularly as you die pretty easily.

The Multiplayer could be good if the combat were a bit more accurate and the environments weren’t so vibrant – you sort of get lost in the jungle too often to care about winning the game

Overall, it’s not bad for a game-of-the-movie, but if Avatar wasn’t attached to a Blockbuster, it would probably struggle to rival similar titles like Fable 2 for a piece of the role playing/fighter market.

Check out gameplay below: