Tedious as it is, shouldn't it be called the Never Ending Story?
James Cameron's ode to hippiness is apparently going to be a critical darling. But, Cameron's track record in gaming is sketchy. Dark Angel, let's be honest, was dogshit. In fact, I hesitate to refer to that due to a concern of offending dogs and their fecal matter.
Anywhoo, after the genius concept of a Titanic FPS never saw the light of day --- admit it, it'd be fucking awesome! --- we get Avatar. In Avatar, you play the lead from the movie, who is a parapalegic who can have his identity be placed into a copy of a giant Na'vi, a big-assed blue dude from the planet Pandora. Pandora is not the most hospitable planet out there --- the air can kill people and the fauna and animals don't like you much, either.
Early on, you get the choice of helping your allies kill a doctor who has "gone native", so to say, or to join the noble Na'vi in fighting off the evil Earthlings. It takes a great amount of deep thinking and advance consideration to figure out who the "good guys" are here.
The visuals are amazingly lush. In fact, if your TV can pull it off, it has 3-D effects that apparently are rather nice. It really is impressively nice-looking. The movie it's based on is, apparently, gorgeous and it only helps here. Now, the environments are nice. The character models, on the other hand, aren't as nice. The humans, when you're playing the Na'vi, are puny. The other Na'vi don't do a hell of a lot for me.
The game's biggest flaw, though, is the sheer tediousness of it. The worlds are huge, but you do the same damned thing over and over. I am more tolerant of a boring game if it, at least, has the grace to be short. This game took a solid 14 hours, and little of it was all that enjoyable. You get the infinite joy of doing basically identical objectives in every area and then using your Na'vi powers to invade Earthline bases and lay waste to people using the same two or three moves you know.
Trust me, it's less exciting than it sounds.
Movie games tend to suck and this has hardly broken that streak. If they actually shaved off a few hours, it'd have been significantly better.
