The Avatar Game Is So Good, They Don’t Need to Make the Movies Anymore

The Avatar video the game is better than the movies.

I say this as someone who has stupidly loved James Cameron’s Avatar movies for a long time. The original 2009 film was my first ever midnight premiere, which I attended with a friend sitting in the theater shirtless, my entire body painted blue. I can’t forget that experience, or the nearly three-hour bioluminescent journey that followed, and the series has kept me hooked ever since.

People talk a lot about Avatar. They find the films’ plots derivative, the characters forgettable, the running times almost inhumanly long. (The third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is available now and is 3 hours and 15 minutes long, not including previews.)

These criticisms are fair. Exactly, even. But true Avatar sufferers (hi) might ask: What if this experience could be even longer, in fact? And if you could spend even more time roaming the sprawling, luminous forests of a verdant alien moon? If that sounds appealing to you, boy, are you going to be excited to hear about the concept of video games.

Avatar: Pandora’s Bordersa game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft in 2023, lets you frolic in the form of a 10-foot-tall Na’vi, the tribal species that lives on the alien moon Pandora.

While the Avatar films were blockbusters that tanked the box office, the game was released without fanfare and to mediocre reviews, although it became a sleeper hit. It has since gathered enough fans that it has received significant updates in the two years since its debut, including downloadable content expansions and a free mode that switches the game’s first-person view to a third-person view, allowing players to enjoy all of their character’s great blueness. A new DLC story, titled Asheswas released today, the same day as the third film in the series.

The game might be the best thing to ever happen to the Avatar series. Where the films have their own stories to tell (family, love, that sort of thing), the game plays very differently with your own personalized Na’vi.

This is a righteous ecoterrorism simulator wrapped in the most magnificent botanical garden I’ve ever seen. Your gargantuan blue treehugger roams a world where all the really pretty plants want to kill you. Your job is to impale tiny human colonizers with your log-sized spears. By eliminating the bad guys and demolishing their camps that spew pollution into the air and water, you can allow the planet’s foliage to grow back in its place. (Don’t feel bad for the humans. They’re sad, angry creatures, and I’ll kill thousands of them if it makes the pretty forest even a little prettier.) Then spend all the downtime you want hanging out in Pandora’s verdant paradise, bouncing on neon lily pads, and running through spiraling plants that will THOOOMP and shrink into the ground when you touch them.