This movie’s being touted to be a graphical and technological masterpiece, but does the iPhone game counterpart let the movie down?

James Cameron’s Avatar ($9.99)

Gameloft‘s got a good track record with movie tie in games starting with Terminator Salvation. For James Cameron’s just released epic masterpiece, Gameloft pulled out ALL the stop to create an iPhone game just as beautiful and enticing as the movie itself.

Presentation

The games graphics are what impressed me the most. Lately I’ve been feeling left out a bit, seeing how great games look on the 3GS hardware. So when I heard Avatar had 3GS improvements, I got worried. I was shocked when I started playing the game and saw how great and smooth the graphics were.

Not only that but they’re very vivid, very accurate to the film (from what I’ve seen of it anyways), it matches right in with the models from the movie. It even appears to have some of the cast’s voices. It’s very impressive to see how they meticulously tried to make the look so close to the movie.

Controls

Avatar uses Gameloft’s similar joystick / buttons that we’ve gotten used to. And like in the past, it seems to be working pretty well and smoothly. As expected the joystick is to move in a direction, with a button for jumping and for attacking. As you get more weapons in that bottom-right hand corner a little button appears to switch between weapons quickly.

Depending on what you’re doing the control buttons change slightly, which is expected considering how many different things you can make your character do in the game. You have climbing, swinging, basic fighting, and even some crazy sort of horse creature. For example when climbing the attack button changes to a down arrow to drop. I like the controls, besides the normal issues you have with it being all on-screen and not physical.

Game Play

The game, although set in the Avatar world, is not exactly your typical movie game. It serves more of a prequel to the movie, into the first “expedition” into their world. Avatar is mostly a 3D platformer, with the camera moving every once in a while it can become a side-scroller for a while.

The gameplay of Avatar is solid, not only does it vary and always entertain you, but it has a quite decent length. The average length of it is about 7-8 hours. Though most of the time the camera works with you, it can be annoying sometimes when it suddenly decides to act up and it acts up. For example in a level I was climbing, the camera was just in the wrong angle, it made climbing very difficult, I was basically climbing up blind.

The game is pretty much Hero of Sparta set in a more mythical and beautiful world. Avatar is accentuated by fairy dust things and some really cool haunting soundtrack. This game shows how true platformers ARE possible on this device!

Suggestions

Other than the little camera issue I mentioned above, there is one other issue I have with the game, the fighting. The enemies don’t really have much of a strategy or technique.

Fighting just involves you going up to the enemy and just tapping the attack button rapidly. It’d be nice if in the future Gameloft games the fighting was more advanced, giving you more of a challenge.

Lastly, I wish there was some sort of level selection screen in which we can press and go back to the previous levels. The game is so creatively mastered it’s hard not to go back a level or two just to see the level again.

Conclusion

I highly recommend this game, it’s just great. It’s a very impressive game on iPhone, and has become my most recent favorite. The dynamic camera changes might be a bit much sometimes but I understand this adds a whole new dynamic to the game.

To answer the question “if this fails the movie”, the answer is a big fat HELL NO. From the easy but slowly increasingly complex tutorial, you know this game is VERY MUCH worth the $9.99. Get it now, and you will NOT regret it!