With James Cameron's blockbuster feature film AVATAR living up to its promotional hype at least in terms of box office receipts, the highly anticipated video game tie-in faced a great deal of player pressure to deliver an equally stand-out experience on platforms at home.  Indeed, given the generally poor reception movie tie-in games receive (often deserved), could any video game adaptation hold up to what Cameron's largely unprecedented feature offers?  The short answer is no, but sadly AVATAR The Game fails to exceed even the expectations of its third-person action/shooter genre in a year boasting top-notch titles.

Your enjoyment of this game boils down to a simple dividing line: do you seek challenging game play as a controller-jockey or do you yearn for the sci-fi alien world experience of Cameron's film?  AVATAR offers a rather repetitive gaming experience for veteran platform players (this from a relative novice XBox owner who should have been challenged more at my experience level), but the game does deliver much of the visual appeal and exotic creatures seen and enjoyed in the feature film.  Soaring banshees attack Samson helicopter ships and Na'vi warriors defend their homeland against RDA soldiers tromping through the jungles in AMP mechanical suits — check.  Dangerous and glowingly beautiful flora populating the dense, endless forest of the Pandora moon — check.  These are largely stunning, impressive visuals for any platform game and should not go unappreciated for their inclusion and enhancement to the gaming experience. But in terms of the film-to-game transfer, this is a victorious battle which does not by itself win the war.

Less winning efforts appear in the level quest missions, which often settle down into a repetitive pattern of seek, collect and report to complete given tasks. Sadly this is where AVATAR falls into the dreaded trap of movie tie-in games, padding play with rote performance that has little to do with the creative spark of the feature inspiring it.  As the RDA newbie character Ryder, you assume your avatar persona as a genetically engineered Na'vi to infiltrate the world of these tall blue aliens.  Quickly you must choose between continuing to serve your human military mission or betray your own species to fight with the Na'vi against the RDA invaders.  Oddly this choice sidesteps most of the philosophical implications, resulting largely in a choice between gameplay in highly typical third-person shooter mode (RDA gun barrels mowing down flora and fauna in your sites) or fighter mode wielding bow and club against the marauding mercenaries. The outcomes will indeed differ as will your experience getting there, which does add a pseudo 2-for-1 value to this title, but I doubt serious gamers will find either path truly challenging or as mind-blowing as hoped.

Though it may not be fair, I'll compare AVATAR's moderate success to our recent review of BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM, a game not bound by any specific film plot but one which lovingly, cleverly replicates the mythological experience of its franchise.  Granted its scope is much more confined by definition, but ARKHAM ASYLUM brilliantly delivers the feeling that you are Batman, even in a third-person design — the game plays like the Caped Crusader thinks and fights.  AVATAR lacks this palpable component in both its lackluster characters and inert motivation to fight for a lofty cause, players inevitably end up playing to complete the game levels and unlock end-side multiplayer modes like Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag.  These are bonus elements to extend total gaming hours possible, but not necessarily any advancement in the game you've already had in single player mode.

Likely this is AVATAR's unavoidable hurdle to exceeding gamer expectations: if you're playing it, you've already seen the vast majority of the game's situations, creatures and environment on the big screen, and it's an impossible task to expect a game to blow past the film's known boundaries yet remain a tie-in title.  Accordingly its success must rise or fall from the gaming experience itself: does it put you in control of a personalized experience that the feature delivered to mass audiences?  As noted, the results are a mixed bag of triumphs and missed opportunities.  Cameron himself has expressed hopes that his AVATAR film will inspire its own franchise of feature and game expansions, but this tie-in platform launch is a shadow of what may come in the hands of developers free to truly invent and explore his universe.  Worthy of a rental to gain your chance to fly and fight on Pandora's visually stunning moon, AVATAR The Game provides the action but not the mind-blowing experience of waging the alien war that has packed audiences into theaters this December. It won't change the way games are played forever, that's certain.