James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game

No box office smash is complete without a low-quality video game tie-in. True to form, the story behind Avatar: The Game is wafer-thin and has little to do with the plot of the film itself.

You play a signals expert named Ryder who has just landed on the planet Pandora. For reasons that are not adequately explained in the game, Pandora’s human colonists are able to transfer their consciousness to ‘avatars’ of Pandora’s indigenous population, the Na’vi.

After a series of humdrum, run-and-fetch missions as both a human and a 10-foot-tall blue alien, you suddenly have to make a choice between siding with your own people or staying in the avatar and joining the Na’vi, effectively offering you two completely different games in one.

In either case, however, the game continues to drip-feed uninspiring, forgettable missions (most of which involve fetching something) until you either reach the equally forgettable conclusion or give up playing altogether – whichever comes first.

The only genuinely interesting thing about Avatar: The Game is that, like its cinematic sibling, it features support for stereoscopic 3D to further enhance its already vibrant visuals. However, to benefit from this, you will need to invest in a lot of specialised equipment, including a compatible Nvidia graphics card, special glasses and a 120Hz-capable display.

Its 3D capabilities aside, Avatar: The Game’s crowning achievement is the way in which it takes the astonishing spectacle of the movie and reduces it to an ultimately mundane gaming experience.