At the moment, James Cameron’s Avatar feels like just about the biggest movie ever – egged on by its gazillion dollar budget and all those posters plastered from here to the ends of the earth. Can the inevitable video game tie-in hope to suck-up some of its glory or is it destined to rot away underneath the canopy? We cut through the undergrowth in this James Cameron’s Avatar for Nintendo DS review.
Just like the film, the Nintendo DS game of Avatar is set on the lush alien world Pandora. Rather than following the fortunes of the alien-human hybrid avatar characters, you play as a bonafide Na’vi, the planet’s native species.
Avatar for Nintendo DS opens just as the humans kick off the first stages of their invasion, so you spend the first part of the game scampering after these ‘sky people’, wondering just what they’re up to. It’s a while before you realise that they’re the enemy though, so the first few chapters are packed with whacking local resident insects and animals rather than gun-wielding soldiers.
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Unfortunately, even when the action begins proper, Avatar for Nintendo DS tends to feel a bit aimless. It’s a top-down Zelda-style exploratory action game where you’re constantly given objectives and waypoints but, because the storytelling is so flat, part of you ends up wishing they’d tarmac over the lush greenery of Pandora and be done with it.
Much more could have been made of Pandora’s beauty too. Characters are decently rendered in 3D but thanks to the top-down view, most of the time it feels like you’re just running around a big green field in Avatar for Nintendo DS.
With an injection of passion, Avatar for Nintendo DS could have stood up by itself as a thoroughly decent casual roleplaying game, but as is you’d better be a fan of the film before doling out those notes. There are decent puzzles, and the additional equipment you get to wield along the way – such as grappling hooks and other projectiles – adds to this, but it doesn’t smooth-over the fact that Avatar feels largely faceless.
Still, if your popcorn-fuelled high from watching the Avatar movie is strong enough to propel you through the DS game’s weaker points, there are a good few half-popped kernels of a good game in Avatar for Nintendo DS. The controls are highly intuitive, the gesture-based combat’s perfectly fine and some of the later head-scratching puzzles are worth a nod of approval.
