The Last Airbender review: The Last Airbender

There's already been one lukewarm game based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, but this particular game is based upon M. Night Shyamalan's movie of the same property. Shyamalan's well-known for movies with interesting (or at least theoretically interesting) plot twists hidden well within them.

4.7

The Last Airbender

The Good

Presumably authentic to the movie.

The Bad

Inept combat. Tedious and repetitive. Awful animation and visuals. The tagline "Discover Your Bending Powers" does not, in fact, refer to Futurama.

The Bottom Line

M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is yet another in a long line of tepid action movie tie-ins. Unless you're fanatical to the point of obsession about the story, don't bother.

The Last Airbender (the game — we'll admit to not having seen the film prior to playing the game) does indeed contain a twist. But as with any good twist, you don't want to play your hand too early. A twist given away right at the start isn't a twist, it's just a plot point.

So instead, let's head off to Thesaurus corner for a quick refresher on the word "Bad".

Bad: substandard, poor, inferior, second-rate, second-class, unsatisfactory, inadequate, unacceptable, not up to scratch, not up to par, deficient, imperfect, defective, faulty, shoddy, amateurish, careless, negligent, miserable, sorry; incompetent, inept, inexpert, ineffectual; awful, atrocious, appalling, execrable, deplorable, terrible, abysmal, godawful; crummy, rotten, pathetic, useless, woeful, bum, lousy, not up to snuff.

Now, are you ready for the big surprising twist? The twist is...

*drumroll*

That almost every one of those synonyms applies to The Last Airbender. OK, maybe "negligent" is a touch unfair, but the rest hold quite well.

The game itself is an action title that casts you in three distinct roles: Prince Zuko, who controls fire elements; Aang, the Avatar hero with wind powers; and the Blue Spirit, who uses a more stealthy approach to combat. The Spirit's easily the most interesting character to control, but even that's faint praise, as the game is plodding, with lengthy levels that see you performing the same tasks over and over again while you fight with the floaty jump controls that see you plummet as often as you make a jump, and then fight with the repetitive enemies who have the grainy look of an early PlayStation game. Motion control appears to have been thrown in at the last minute, with some special attacks that rely on imprecise wiggling to enable.

The collision detection is laughably awful, whether you're in combat or jumping from ledge to ledge. About the nicest thing we can say about it is that it's consistently woeful in its turgid lack of connection to the reality that it presents, so while your attacks don't look like they're hitting all that much, they always look that way. There's also no block button for any of the characters, ensuring that you hop around like a drug-addled rabbit in order to avoid being rushed by groups of enemies for as long as your patience holds out.

Presumably if you loved the film and the surrounding Avatar world to the point of myopia, this might be acceptable but mundane gaming. If you don't, this is a game best avoided, as there's many other better action games on the Wii.