Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
“Just because your DNA is a one in a billion match doesn’t mean you can be a princess,” says Dr Monroe. “Get moving, tiara.”
Avatar: The Game arrived right on the cusp of Ubisoft’s imperial phase. Fresh from Far Cry 2 and Assassin’s Creed II, the publisher would soon codify the lessons of those games and spread them throughout its international teams—dominating the open-world genre for the next decade.
Yet this project is something of a hangover from an earlier point in Ubisoft’s life. A period of game development in which licensed movie tie-ins were created on a limited budget, to a deadline dictated by Hollywood. Ubi had managed to beat the odds once previously, when Rayman creator Michel Ancel directed a well-received King Kong game for Peter Jackson. But Avatar: The Game visibly suffers from its circumstances. Ryder’s animations are less lavish than those of Ezio Auditore, and Pandora’s lighting less spectacular than the sun that splashes across Far Cry 2’s Africa.
Still, there’s ambition here of a kind. Avatar: The Game’s most intriguing choice is the one it asks you to make a short way through its campaign. Are you going to follow in the oversized footsteps of Jake Sully and embrace life among the na’vi? Or stick with the RDA, the corp that funded your journey here in the first place?
Since there’s likely never going to be another Avatar game in which you play the baddies, I plumped for the latter. To be honest, the alternative wasn’t particularly tempting. In Frontiers of Pandora, na’vi players get to navigate the world as natives, springing between car-sized mushrooms and sliding down branches like parkour stars. Ryder’s avatar, by contrast, is simply a very large and brightly-coloured soldier. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun to mount a direhorse in the wild and canter through the trees. But when your weapons and abilities are indistinguishable from those you wield as a human, you wonder why the RDA bothered with the Program at all.
More fun, then, to be an ignorant schmuck with a machine gun. Played on the human side, Avatar: The Game becomes a technicolour Vietnam movie. Your mission isn’t to fight in the war, per se, but to locate and secure a series of tuning crystals. With their help, and that of Dr Monroe, you’ll triangulate an abandoned Well of Souls, which the RDA hopes will give them a backdoor to Eywa—and ultimately a way of cutting off the na’vi from their goddess.
It’s easy to feel like Martin Sheen venturing into the heart of darkness—despite the array of glowing flora and fauna. Troops glower as you roll through on your special mission, resentful of the soldiers they’ve lost holding the territory that contains your magical singing rocks. You’ll search for shards in areas that have been pre-approved for airstrikes, wincing as the bombs land around your head.
Avatar: The Game might be built on Far Cry’s Dunia engine, but its levels aren’t open. Instead, its jungles are constructed like warrens, with multiple meandering paths carrying you from one objective to the next. The very ecosystem is hostile to outsiders: plants barfing poison gas at your feet, thwacking with vines, or simply exploding like mines. The flamethrower becomes your best friend as you brute-force your way through a natural world that hates you, just as much as it loves the na’vi.
Your quest takes you constantly back and forth across the frontline, where RDA troops engage the blue folk in bitter firefights. You’re free to engage whenever you like, but it doesn’t feel like your battle, exactly: merely the rocky sea you need to cross to reach your objectives.
To that end, Ubisoft stuffs its jungle full of vehicles you can hop in and out of at will. Maybe you’ll pilot one of those exosuits Cameron has been obsessed with since Aliens. Then, once the na’vi stick a spear through the fuel tank, switch to a buggy instead—running down viperwolves at inadvisably high speeds. If you can steer a four-wheeled vehicle across a snaking tree trunk without tumbling through the canopy below, you have truly mastered the peculiar skillset Pandora demands.
Let’s be clear: all of the above is clumsily implemented, with limited physics modelling that fails to convince you’re turning a tight corner on rough terrain—let alone piloting a Scorpion gunship between floating islands. But Ubi’s freeform approach to vehicle-swapping is endearing nonetheless, lending Avatar: The Game the feel of a solo Battlefield, played with idiotic bots and second-rate assault rifles.
As the short campaign wears on, you repeat the same objectives—the definition of insanity, as a fella in Far Cry once said—and watch your superiors at Hell’s Gate descend into paranoia and infighting. The scientists, in their attempts to emulate a voice that can talk to Eywa, run ‘doomsday’ diagnostics in case their attempt to trick a goddess backfires. But the RDA pushes on. “Don’t start growing a brain, Ryder,” says one commander. “If you don’t have the lumps to do this, I’ll find someone else.”
Eventually, of course, you reach the Well of Souls. There’s a bit of a light show, and a lot of ominous rumbling. But in the end, it’s not clear whether the RDA have succeeded, failed, or made any impact at all. “Eywa needed to see what we were capable of,” says Sigourney Weaver, reassuringly. “And now she knows. Next time she’ll be ready.” Right. Cheers. Is that lorespeak for, ‘This was a throwaway prequel, don’t overthink it’?
It’s certainly true that Avatar: The Game isn’t recognised as canon. Contemporary reviewers were unmoved, and Ubisoft has never made any effort to commemorate the game since. Perhaps its greatest contribution was as a stepping stone to the really quite excellent Frontiers of Pandora, and as a reminder of the publisher’s more humble origins. Mind you: Ubi did just retroactively add a third-person mode to Frontiers of Pandora alongside its new expansion. So maybe Avatar: The Game got one thing right the first time.
If you’re wondering what became of ‘Able’ Ryder, consider that my commander threatened latrine duty for a month if anything happened to his gunship. Given that I crashed the thing into a mountain or two afterwards, it’s fair to assume that Ryder spent the events of the subsequent Avatar movies not clutching a machine gun, but a bottle of Toilet Duck.
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