Film tie-in games rarely achieve anything more than superficial similarity to the property they’re attempting to imbue with an interactive edge, rather than being decent releases in their own right. Quite why they never seem to really work depends, we suppose, on the depth of the property they’re drawing on. Films are made to exist in a single medium more often than not – how they’d work in a three-dimensional setting with constant input by the audience isn’t really taken into account when you’re primarily concerned with mis-en-scene and getting the right light for your male lead. To be fair, films made from games suffer from the same crippling lack of quality.

It was with a certain reluctance then, that NowGamer sat down to give the Avatar game, due to be released just before the film’s inevitably huge theatrical debut, a run for its Na’vi. From the off though, it was clear that this would be a different beast to what we were used to – writer Kevin Shortt gave us an introduction to the game, running us through its various functions and the narrative structure, as well as telling us that director James Cameron’s team had shared all of their models and assets with the game design team during production. In fact, one of the game’s vehicles even made it into the film for a brief cameo, it was liked so much by the Avatar team.

Set five years before the events of the film, the game isn’t so much a prequel as simply another episode within the shared universe that centres on Pandora, the moon at the heart of the story. You take on the role of Ryder, a signals specialist shipped in from Earth for his talents and his ability to connect with the titular Avatar, a mix of his DNA and that of the native Na’vi species. The game is played primarily in a third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective and the obligatory training aspect is woven into the initial storyline, where you learn to control the camera, movement and other aspects.

We played through a number of side quests in our limited hands-on with the 360 version. Some of them were fairly standard – activating repulsor fields to stop the attack of the Viperwolves (fast, agile and deadly predators that are surprisingly hard to kill and even harder to hit) and save a stranded marine, but others were more entertaining. One that sticks in our mind was covering the retreat of a marine squadron from the forest back to the relative safety of the enclosure, manning a machine gun to gun down pursuing creatures. It’s not until you spend a little time in Pandora that you begin to develop an appreciation for the sense of atmosphere that Ubisoft has created in this game. You find yourself creeping quietly through the forest, but attempting to move as quickly as possible. Your ears become attuned to periods of silence, or the occasional rustle in the undergrowth that could herald an approaching Viperwolf. More than once, we found ourselves shooting at shadows in the trees.

… continued