James Cameron's Avatar: The Game was for me a highly anticipated release. The third person shooter genre is one i enjoy as it allows you to appreciate the massive detail of the game universe to a greater degree than first person, and Avatar looked set to blitz the field. I really enjoyed the movie, and so it could be said that the game had a large shoes to fill. Unfortunately to me, it seemed that they may have been a tad too big.

The graphics are excellent, though not to the point of needing a $3000 system to run it, and the universe maps are (though sometimes a little restricting) nice to walk around and explore in.

It is the game mechanics and the controls which really disappointed me though. The base movement controls are fairly good, however it seemed that they could have benefited from something more FPS orientated. It just seemed a little awkward at times. This has to be epitomised though, by the flight controls of the Banshee. With Space and LShift to rise or fall, and forward motion required for a very slow turn, let alone quite an annoyingly slow rate of descent, the controls just seemed far to hard for me to really get a grip on. I was expecting to be swooping and diving and doing all the cool stuff i saw in the movie, however it seems i spent far more time running into giant floating rocks and canyon walls. Perhaps with more practice you could get used to it, however i prefer an intuitive control system, not one that takes double digit hours of game play to master. The RDA equivalent, The Schorpian, is slightly more bearable due to it's on the spot axial movement however it could also be far more streamline and intuitive. The excitement of having missiles and a whole lots of bullets to waste, as opposed to the unarmed Banshee, is unfortunately eclipsed by the limited aiming reticle. The Scorpian has very very limited tilt ability, and is only able to fire straight ahead, making it disappointingly difficult to engage ground troops.

The EMP exoskelton suit could also be improved. The problem though is in fact that it can not melee like in the movie, so it can easily be defeated by a Na'vi who simply gets up really close to it. Perhaps this was left out due to concerns of inbalanced game play, however if the rest of the game was balanced so the RDA actually had to use all their awesome machines, the perhaps this wouldn't be an issue.

The Conquest mode in single player was another feature with a lot of potential, yet it unfortunately also disappointed me. The feature in general is one where the player controls territories on a world map, and creates and moves troops to conquer other territories. Obviously intended to simply supplement single player, rather than provide an alternative to it, gaining territories gives you benefits in story mode such as experience boosts and stat upgrades. The combat mechanics are a simple number crunching system, so those like myself who wish to lead huge armies against the RDA in epic battl