I say this as someone who has long admired James Cameron’s Avatar films. The original 2009 film was my first midnight premiere, which I attended with a friend, sitting in the theater shirtless with his entire body painted blue. I’ll never forget that experience or the nearly three-hour bioluminescent journey that followed, and the series has kept me hooked ever since.
People talk a lot of nonsense about Avatar. They find the films’ plots derivative, the characters forgettable, the running time almost inhumanly long. (third film, Avatar: Fire and Ashes, is out now and runs for a total of 3 hours and 15 minutes, not including previews.)
Those criticisms are fair. Right, even. But true avatar sickos may ask, what if that experience could actually last even longer? What if you can even afford it? More Time to trek through the vast, glowing forests of a lush alien moon? If this sounds appealing, then boy, will you be excited to hear about the video game concept.
Avatar: The Borderlands of PandoraA game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft in 2023, lets you walk around as a 10-foot tall Na’vi, an aboriginal species living on the alien moon Pandora.
While the Avatar films are blockbusters that have taken the box office by storm, the game was released with less fanfare and mediocre reviews, although it became a sleeper hit. It has since gained such a fan base that it has received significant updates in the two years since its launch, including downloadable content expansions and a free mode that changes the game’s first-person view to a third-person view, allowing players to enjoy all the big blues of their character. A new DLC story, titled from ashesReleased today, the same day as the third film in the series.
This game might be the best thing to happen to the Avatar series so far. Where the movies have their own stories to tell (family, love, that kind of thing), the game plays out very differently with your own custom Na’vi.
It’s a righteous ecoterrorism simulator wrapped in the most gorgeous botanical garden I’ve ever seen. Your sky-scraping blue TreeHugger roams a world where all the very beautiful plants want to kill you. Your job is to injure the little human colonists with your log-shaped spears. By eliminating the bad guys and demolishing their camps that spread pollution into the air and water, you can allow the leaves of the world to grow back in their place. (Don’t feel bad for humans. They’re sad, angry creatures, and I’d kill thousands of them if it made the beautiful forest even a little more beautiful.) Then spend whatever free time you want wandering the lush paradise of Pandora, bouncing on neon lily pads and running among spiraling plants. thump And when you touch them they shrink into the ground.
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