James Cameron's Avatar: The Game

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you should know by now that James Cameron’s latest movie, Avatar, is setting the box office world on fire. It has recently become the highest grossing film in ticket sales and sports the highest level of visual effects and depth of environment ever seen. I myself have seen the movie in 3D and despite the movie’s flaws (the obvious one being the clichéd plot), I give the movie a very high recommendation.

I have also taken the time to play the game. If you are fan of the game, now is the time to stop reading this post as I am about to rip shreds off this game until there is nothing left by a spinal column and the original licence Ubisoft signed with Cameron!

Overview

Set two years before the events of the movie, the player is cast the role of a marine that has just arrived on Pandora. Pandora is home to a native race called the Na’vi: blue skinned, cat like humanoids that live in complete harmony with their home planet’s forest/eco-system. As the atmosphere is toxic to humans, remote controlled human-Na’vi hybrids called Avatars have been genetically engineered to carry out operations on the ground.

Early in the game, the player is able to make a one-time choice as to which side he/she supports. The player can side with the Na’vi and help them repel the human marines or the player can choose to side with the humans and try to defeat the Na’vi.

It should be pointed out that this review only assesses the Na’vi possibility of the game. If a game offers me choice, I use the same rationality as I would in the real world. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that regardless of what choices I make in game, the consequences of my actions in the game should all be well designed.

Game Play

In general, game play as a Na’vi is a mix of adventure and action. Naturally, as the Na’vi are ‘one with the forest’ the weapons are themed as such. Primarily, the player has a bow and is able to equip three other weapons such as spears, duel swords and even a cross bow. In addition to weapons, players are also able to equip special abilities which varying from healing the player to doing damage to surrounding adversaries to even cloaking the player. New weapons, skills and even armour are awarded by collecting experience points. Points are awarded for defeating enemies, completing objectives or solving adventure quests.

Overall though, combat in the game felt sticky at times. Research soon revealed to me that the game makes use of the Dunia engine, the same engine as that used for Far Cry 2. This certainly explains why enemies were constantly crawling out of the wood work and why they were still able to see me hiding in a concrete bunker yards away.

As the player moves through various regions/locations on Pandora, the player is also able to ride the local animal life. Unfortunately, the control system for the creatures was not though out and I personally found it more effective to go about on foot. There as was a case where flying an Ikran was so bad, I went to adjust the control scheme only to find it static and gave up in the end. Having seen the movie, this was the one creature I wanted to fly and was disappointed at the outcome.

A final element of combat is the ability to use the plant life of Pandora to help you. For a start, it is possible to collect samples from plants (and downed enemies) to fill what was called a recovery bag. When the player loses all health, it is possible to consume samples from the bag to restore ones health. Besides offering samples, it is possible to fire arrows at the plant life so that enemies are affected either with explosions or poisonous gasses. While the possibility is there, the practice is not. Despite Pandora being rich with plant life, the plants that can be used in combat are few and far between.

This sums up the action part of Na’vi game play. Being an adventure fan to the likes of Myst I found myself underwhelmed. In all, the adventure in the game can only be compared to the trade quests found in Zelda games. The most the player ever does in terms of adventure is to either completely map the current region, take out X number of enemies or devices, etc.

A final element in the game is the in-built conquest mini-game where the player is presented with a global map of Pandora and attempts to take back whole regions using turn based, real time strategy. As the player progresses via the main game, experience points are converted into currency so that extra units and base facilities can be purchased. Additionally, when an area is reclaimed, the player is given a reward for the mini-game (such as bonus units) or an enhancement to the main game character such as improved strength or defence.

Overall, while there are many game play elements, there is no integration between them. The end result is, frankly, a Jack of all trades, master of none. As stated earlier, the ineffective control scheme also made me want to avoid certain elements because they simply did not work. Finally, there is the question of the conquest mini-game. I do not see why strength, defence and other power up were not simply given as the player character levels up.

Story

One way to make a really good game is to present it with a really good story. In general, the player should see the development of the characters with each other, should relate to them and eventually understand the reasoning for each characters actions. As a rule of thumb, the player should be able to sympathise/relate to the protagonist.

Unfortunately, the story in incomplete and even leaves out the vitals as found in textbook stories. The story of the game does not even have an engaging plot. The protagonist (playable character) is just there as is the antagonist. Basically, the story of the game is just a string of events that self justify their existance.

Graphics and Sound

The crowning achievement of Avatar (the movie) is the creation of a completely digital environment that feels like it could actually exist. Pandora really is a place of intrigue, especially at night when all the plant and animal life give off a natural glow in the dark. Hence Pandora is just as beautiful at night as it is at day.

This attention to detail was well reflected in the game and is possibly the only good feature I can find thus far. Visually, the various locations are vibrant and the addition of Na’vi going about their daily takes adds an extra layer of realism. There is even a night time sequence in the game, again with matching detail as that found in the movie. My only complaint is that the night time segment is too short and it is (as far as I know) impossible to set off again. I only got to experience it for 15 minutes then it was day time again and it stayed that way for the rest of the game.

Finally, there is the sound. As much as I like the visual presentation of Pandora, visuals need sound to be taken seriously. And once again, this game fails to deliver. This is only around one or two sounds for each wildlife creature, two voices for the ground marines and basically stock standard environment sounds were used for the Pandora landscape.

Overall

While it is common knowledge that movie tie-in games shame the movies that represent, Avatar, as a whole, is worse in that it both shames and even tries to drag the movie down with it. Pandora had a lot to offer in terms of gaming and even offered the possibility of breaking the movie tie-in mould. Alas, this was not the case.

The game is crippled by having too many game play elements with no consistency between them. The controls are sloppy and there is no means of remapping them to suit the player. The sound is weak. Finally, the story is so minimal that it might as not be there.

I have heard that playing the game as a marine is significantly different but I am in no hurry to play this game again. Gaming is a form of interactive entertainment thus has to offer the player an engaging and enjoyable experience. Avatar does neither and if one has not seen the movie yet, I strongly recommend that one sees the movie before the game.

Prince of Persia

Having never played a Prince of Persia game, I felt it was finally time I gave the games a try and find out what the hype was about. I can safely say I regret never playing the games and I now feel I denied myself a lot of fun. Personal reflection aside, time to examine the newest installment.

Overview

At the start of the game, the Prince is found fighting a sand storm calling out for his donkey. As soon as the sand storm clears, the Prince soon finds a female named Elika, who is being chased by some guards with spears.

Shortly after following Elika, the Prince soon finds himself helping her fight an achient God Ahriman: a evil good imprisons thousands of years ago that has been released and is bent on enshrouding the world in darkness.

To defeat the God, Arhiman, the Prince must aide Elika in travelling to four corrupted lands and restoring Fertile Grounds, which in turn remove the evil corrupting it and allowing Elika to gain now powers along the way.

Gameplay

The majority of the game play is acrobatic platforming. Taking control of the Prince, the player will spend most of his or her time having the Prince run, jump, run along walls and other physical surfaces in an almost Parkour style. The Prince also has a gauntlet that lets him cling to a wall and slowly descend no matter the height.

Even though there are four areas to travel to, the underlying designs of the levels are all the same. They all have the Fertile Grounds at their centre and the Prince has to navigate along the outer walls and eventually find the path that leads to the centre. Furthermore, the player is able to visit each of the four areas as he or she pleases.

To combat the similarity of all four levels, challenges introduced in a complete area appear are present when the player visits the remaining areas. While the transplant of challenges can make the areas more challenging, their impact is minimal at best.

As well as travelling with the Prince, Elika is a handy ally. Whenever the Prince mis-judges a jump or falls off a wall, Elika grabs hold of him and places the Prince back on the last solid ledge he was standing on.

This no-death feature immediately gives on the impression that the game has no challenge. This could not be further from the truth as there are instances in the game where the Prince has to travel a fair distance, almost half the length of an area, and if he falls off, he will be transported back to the ledge where he started.

The frustration only gets worse when the Prince is engaged in combat. Every once in a while, the Prince will either encounter an enemy or a boss and a fight sequence ensures.

Combat, in a word, is frustrating and jarring. During combat, the Prince stops running altogether and only paces back and forth depending on which direction the player indicates with the analogue stick. This change of pace tears the flow of the game and almost makes the game feel it has changed game play modes.

The main frustration of combat is the player has no target control. Once a battle starts, the Prince is automatically locked on his adversary. This prevents the player from quickly moving to a strategic location. Even though the player is able dodge and counter attacks, this is of little comfort.

During combat, Elika is able to help by saving the Prince by pulling him out of harm’s way if the enemy gets the better of him and is even able to perform acrobatic attacks of her own. Unfortunately, when Elika saves the Prince, the enemy gets an almost full health back and unless the Prince is dangerously close the enemy, Elika will not perform her acrobatic attacks.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics of Prince of Persia are very colourful, a change just as welcome as it was with Mirror’s Edge. In today’s gaming, high definition tends to mean that all graphics are, at best, grey- or brown-scale. Prince of Persia defies this rule by having colourful and almost anime-style visual.

This is not always the case though. When the Prince and Elika first visit a corrupted area, everything is in either blue- or green-scale. Added with enemies being black, traversing the levels can be difficult as obstacles are difficult to see even when viewing the game on the highest contrast and in a dark room.

Dark colouring aside, when a lead is restored to its full colour, it sometimes pays to sit back and drink in the scenery.

When it comes to sound, Prince of Persia puts it to very good use. While an area is corrupted, all sounds take on a greasy and or oily nature. The sounds in such areas feel as though they have been completely industrialised and nothing nature remains.

When an area is cleared of the corruption, all sounds are replaced with their organic counter parts. One can hear the water, the fresh breeze and even the ambient cry of birds.

Character Development

While the Prince has Elika as an ally, the development of the two feels as though it was placed there as an afterthought. Even though there are cut scenes where the Prince and Elika interact, any additional development between the two is only presented manually. To learn more, the player has to routinely stop moving and press one of the buttons to make the Prince and Elika interact.

While it does flesh out their development, the fundamental flaw with this approach is that players may complete the game without talking to Elika once. This can result in the player missing on vast amounts of the story, such as Elika’s background.

Overall

While Prince of Persia was off to a good start, the frustrating battles and manual character development tend to drag it down a bit. The two together tend to cause the flow of the game to stutter and clash with the fluid motion of the parkour style acrobatics.

Regardless, Prince of Persia is a nice change to gaming. Unlike other high definition games, this game is colourful, and instead of spending a majority blowing enemies to bits, the player is challenged mentally. After a long and frustrating battle, it was rewarding to look about and take in the atmosphere.

Mirror's Edge

It seems the market is of the opinion that all we need are first person shooters. It's hard to get more than two feet without seeing one. Even if the genre is elsewhere, the FPS element somehow seeks in.

Mirror's Edge is a very welcome breath of fresh air. While in the first person, the game actually plays as a platformer. In essence, the game is a hybrid of Super Mario Bros. and Tomb Raider. This is rather saddening as while the concept is fresh, the underlying level design and the game as a whole let the concept down.

Overview

The game is set in a futuristic city where the government monitors all communication and movement of its citizens. The player plays as the main character, Faith, who is a runner, a form of courier. As all communication in the city is monitored, the only means of communication privacy is to hire a runner to transport sensitive documents or other items which are of the same size. Faith's sister, Kate, has been framed for the murder of a lawyer and politician and it is up to Faith to find clues as to why her sister has been framed.

Game Play

At its core, Mirror's Edge is an interactive form of parkour, the art of running and performing various acrobatic tasks in as few fluid movements as possible. This is very interesting and gives some interesting challenges to players. As well as looking at the screen, the player has to quickly take in the surroundings and judge for him- or her-self what to do next.

The game plays in the first person, thus adding to the emersion and makes the player feel as though he or she is the runner and not just someone holding a controller and pressing buttons. Also, to help ease new players, a feature in the game called ‘Runner Vision’ is used. Runner Vision causes some objects which can help the player progress be coloured red. If the player ever gets stuck, the idea is to look for red objects to help hint at what the player needs to do next.

There are also times when the player has to engage adversaries. Throughout the game various law and security forces will attempt to take out Faith. This can be problematic at times as Faith can only with stand a few light hits before dying and she some sometimes die faster as some adversaries carry shotguns and even machine guns. In keeping with the parkour concept, the player is able to run about and take out opponents using acrobatics or, if the level allows, sneak up and quietly disarm the opponent.

While Faith is able to engage opponents, the major flaw with the combat is Faith is only able to withstand two or three hits before being knocked out, forcing the player to restart transparent check points. There is no indication when one has been triggered, with adds to the frustration when the player finds him- or her-self back before a previously cumbersome puzzle that must now be solved again. Also, while Faith is able to use guns, she is unable to run even if she so much as holds a pistol. To make matters worse, the bigger the gun, the slow Faith moves.

While the combat feels weak, the issue is nowhere near as large as that of the level design. While promising in concept and possibilities, the game is heavily let down by its level design. While parkour is about moving quickly and fluidly through the environment, the design of the levels is lineal and offers little to no room for experimentation. While playing this game, I felt as though I had been penalised for not following the path chosen by the designers. While there is some room for deviance (like I could choose to run along an alternative wall or take and alternative nearby route to an obstacle) the breadth of this deviance is very minimal.

Even the Runner Vision feature soon turns out to be broken. While the intention of Runner Vision was to help give the player hints on what to do next, this feature doesn't always work as some objects will highlight but their actual function and role in completing the level is often ambiguous.

In the end, I feel that the level structure fails to make the best use of the parkour concept. Parkour would be more suited to designs such as that of Far Cry 2 or Fallout 3. Mirror’s Edge feels more suited towards mission based, free world game play. The player should have been given a mission and be free to use any building or roof top of the city to reach the goal.

Story

It has been advertised that Rhianna Pratchett, the duaghter of Terry Pratchett, helped to pen the story behind Mirror's Edge. I have heard of the Discworld books and given their popularity had high expectations of the story to the game. While playing this game, it felt as though Rhianna Pratchett was not used to the best of her abilities.

The overview of the story is Faith's sister has been framed and Faith runs about the roof tops looking for clues as to who framed her and why. This is the story to the game in a nut shell, and there is nothing more explained in the game.

The story itself lacks heavily in character development and the weakness of the story is made worse by parts of the story being separate to the game itself. Leading up to the release of the game, EA released some promotional videos, each presumably to detail a small part of the story. Firstly, I feel that if they were intended to describe the game, they should have been incorporated into the game itself. This is the same has having some chapters to a murder mystery novel kept separate from the book. Also, even with the videos there are only subtle hints and still nothing is seriously explained such as why Faith is against the city itself.

The biggest flaw of the story is the absence of motivation. It is unclear as to why the runners are so troublesome to the government. It is unclear as to why people would want to use them in the first place. It is even unclear as to why the government is even hiring runners to work for the government itself.

Graphics and Sound

The game itself makes use of the UT3 engine, thus it is safe to say the graphics are very detailed. The game environment is expansive, even though the player has no option to explore, and there is a good attention to detail even to the distant buildings. The only critics I have is the lack of reflections in the game. While there are plenty of windows in the game, the windows themselves are often polarised and only emit a low detailed reflection of the surroundings. While cosmetic, better reflections would have added more feel to the game.

Sound is very well made. The ambiance actually give the person a feeling of being in a real city when on closes his or her eyes. The player is able to hear the wind, the occasion commuter and the traffic. All the sounds in the game blend in and I feel they make the best of the environment.

Finally, the music. In as few words possible: perfect. The soundtrack added rich mood to the levels and really added to the impact whenever combat takes place. If anything, this game is worth getting if only to hear the soundtrack.

Summary

While plagued by faults, the game itself was still worth the time and effort it took to complete. The concept alone is very unique, especially for this season where it has been dominated by first person shooters. The environment is still atmospheric, and soundtrack is enjoyable. Graphics wise, Mirror's Edge is very different in that it's bright and colourful. This is another welcome change as mose high definition games are almost grey- or brown-scale in colour. I hope at some point us as players will be given the option to roam the city itself and not be constrained by the design of the levels.