The Last Airbender

Spoiled children are annoying. Little ones who scream for candy and control the playground with an iron fist. Their behaviour usually doesn't affect anything bigger than family get togethers and visits to the mall, but if you happen to be the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan your behaviour will lead to more severe consequences. She was the one who persuaded the director of The Sixth Sense to base a new movie on a Nickelodeon cartoon.

That's what set things in motion and now the feature film is here and I'm reviewing the inevitable video game that launched alongside it. With a firm grip on my Wiimote I gave The Last Airbender a try. Maybe it's good? It turns out I had no such luck as the developers failed to grasp three basic rules of game design.

First of all, if you can't develop an entertaining fighting system, the fights won't be fun. The fighting in The Last Airbender is completely void of any finesse. It quickly turns me into a mindless button mashers. There is no sense of weight in combat. A special attack can be performed a metre above the head of your opponent and still scores a hit. Enemies come pouring at me and I can only pray that this will end as soon as possible.

Secondly, if you can't engineer entertaining puzzles, they won't be fun for the player to solve. Running around identical corridors trying to find switches in order to open door isn't my idea of entertainment. It's just a horrible means of prolonging the game.

Thirdly, if you can't give your main characters a decent set of animations and movements, platforming won't entertain. All movements are shaky and imprecise. There is no sense of gravity when you jump, and invisible barriers appear all over the place. You can also find yourself standing on thin air without tumbling to your death.

It's a miracle that the developers have failed on all these account and there are more faults to point of. The sloppily animated cutscenes for instance. From a technical standpoint The Last Airbender comes across as a mediocre Playstation 2 game. It's just not enough these days. The environments and enemy design are repetitive and boring. The confusing plot is a minor problem amidst all of this as potential buyers are likely to have seen the movie once or twice. As a newcomer to the field airbending it's harder to follow.

When Wii launched one of the selling points was how intuitive the controls would be. Natural motions instead of pressing buttons. The Last Airbender is a poster boy for how untrue this can be. The game is controlled in a traditional fashion, that is until you activate special attacks. At that point giant arrows appear on screen to show you how to move your Wiimote. How intuitive is that? When you have waved your Wiimote in the wrong direction and still gotten your gesture approved an attack, completely removed from your motion, is performed half a second later.

Somewhere along the line the publishers where this game was heading and decided to launch it at budget price. But don't bother to look at the price tag. You don't want to go through what I've just gone through. Here I am six hours later and all I got out of it was a few shrugs and some yawning. And I blame M. Night Shyamalan's daughter for it.