The last airbender is painful to see in his latest video game adventure in flagrant lack of budget.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is making a big comeback and offers itself a multitude of projects. While feature films and animated series are in full development, Netflix is also preparing its own live-action version. Unsurprisingly, this return to our screens is also accompanied by new video game adaptations. Unfortunately, these seem far from up to the cult program of Nickelodeon.
Despite a strong cultural heritage, these derivative projects seem to suffer from a lack of ambition and budget. After the announcement ofAvatar Generations, a mobile title with basic gameplay and graphics below current standards, the game for consoles seems to suffer from the same problems. IGN just revealed the first trailer forAvatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balancean adventure that seems to retrace the events of the original series, minus the charm.
Beautiful colors and… that’s it
The trailer invites us to “play legend“, a proposal that does not really make you dream. If the game seems to faithfully reproduce the cities and other emblematic places of the series using a rather effective cartoon artistic direction, the same is not true for the characters and their animations. Toph’s earthbender powers look straight out of a game Roblox. In reality, even online game productions are now able to do better, like the Sonic adventure developed in partnership with SEGA. Worse yet, a fan-game Avatar developed on the creative game Dreams seems more successful than the official project.
The few sequences of platforms and other simplistic puzzles are not enough to put stars in your eyes. It remains to be seen if Appa’s backpacking scenes and the clashes against the series’ main antagonists will have enough to catch up. For the time being, fans will have every interest in relaunching a marathon of the series rather than rediscovering the universe with the game. As a reminder, avatar the last airbender is available in its entirety on Netflix, as well as on Paramount+, where subscribers can also find the rest of the story in The Legend of Korra. The experience of the series can also be extended via the excellent comic series.
