Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance is a mess, with clunky combat, way too many pointless puzzles, and baffling choices for which scenes from the series to highlight.

Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is a decent game perfect for younger gamers who are fan of the TV series and want to experience the storylines themselves. For better or for worst, this is clearly a GameMill Entertainment game; decent, mildly enjoyable, slightly too easy but oh so close from being a must play experience. I can only image how much better this could’ve been in the hands of a AAA developer. It’s a fun experience as a whole; worth it’s $20 USD price tag.

While Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance never really impresses, it winds up becoming aggressively fine as it goes on and expectations are lowered.

Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is a jumble of shallow ideas implemented in a simple-minded and clumsy way. The narrative and visuals make little use of the rich base material, exploration is bland, and the combat system is an insult. On average, a big disappointment.

Currently the Avatar franchise has been getting more attention with new productions for TV, streaming, cinema and comics. The rich universe created in 2005 will have many opportunities to attract new audiences and to continue appealing to the fans. However, it's regrettable that the games based on the franchise aren't receiving the same care as the other media.

Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is clearly made for a younger audience. The gameplay, puzzles and races during the story feel old-fashioned, without much challenge. You soon notice that the gameplay consists of one loop that repeats for about 15 hours. The story follows the original series and adds some additional story elements, but this is often shown to the player through mediocre cutscenes and plain text boxes. Avatar's license has a lot of potential and the developer could have gotten a lot more out of it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is a franchise worthy of a high-caliber release, akin to what Batman: Arkham Asylum did for the Batman franchise. The asking price is the worst offender. At $49.99, you are not getting your money’s worth, and it is way overpriced for the content offered. When the world needed a truly great Avatar: The Last Airbender game, it vanished.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest For Balance is, unfortunately, lacking in some aspects and overdone in others. The story is mostly based on the original, and adding in extra events is a nice touch, but simply narrating it instead of showing it didn’t help the low-quality storytelling at all. The combat system needs a lot more polish, and the lack of camera controls that effectively force it to be more like a side-scroller instead makes it difficult to enjoy the game for what it is.