I am a big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. My dad and I watched it together when it was first released, and I’ve seen most of the related content for the franchise, including the terrible live-action movie. I played (and enjoyed) the 3 game adaptations for the franchise that were released between 2006 and 2009, as well as PlatinumGames’ attempt at a Legend of Korra game. How does the newest adaptation fare though? Well, sadly it isn’t their best attempt.

GameMill Entertainment and Bamtang Games’ Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance attempts to condense and adapt the entire original series into an action-adventure game. The premise is that after the events of the series, the Ba Sing Se theater company is attempting to accurately portray the events of Aang’s journey as a stage play. So, Iroh and his Pai Sho playing friends tell the tale from the beginning.

Sadly, this opportunity for a thrilling deep dive into the story of Avatar Aang doesn’t turn out to be anything more than a clunky mess. Opening the game up starts an immediate problem. The options menu offers no resolution settings or anything akin to windowed or windowed-fullscreen modes. Luckily the Alt+Enter trick worked otherwise I’d have had a few issues.

Some players have reported having problems using a gamepad on PC, though I managed to use an Xbox controller with no problem at all. Diving further into the options menu, other than sliders for volumes, a subtitle toggle, and a language toggle, there isn’t much to work with here.

Getting into the actual gameplay leads to a sad realization that the game itself is a repetitive, formulaic mess. The general idea of a level is that you run around, do a fetch quest or two, fight an enemy or two, possibly solve an environmental puzzle, and then you are done with the level.

In between certain levels, there is a Temple Run-esque minigame where you can collect coins and dodge hazards, but even those mini-games are repetitive and annoying after a while. As you play, you can use items to heal or buff your stats, though if you use each character’s abilities even slightly effectively you won’t need items at all.

I would say that Quest for Balance is great for younger fans of the franchise, except the combat controls are not at all user-friendly, and the camera can be an absolute nightmare. That doesn’t even take into account the fact that the developers didn’t even bother to get certain names right, and NPCs sometimes use the same character model up to five or six times in the same area. There are also weird graphical glitches and bugs with characters getting stuck in animations too.

If you can get past the repetitive levels, the clunky combat, and the oversimplified puzzles, there are a few colorful, interesting levels and cutscenes here. Bamtang Games did manage to replicate some of the scenes of the series, and you could play in 2-player co-op if you felt so inclined. There is even a variety of side-quests in each level if you want more repetitive fetch-quests to do to upgrade your characters via their skill trees.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m not at all pleased with Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance. This adaptation is abysmal for a series with so much detail and content that could be pulled from. Considering several games have already been made that did this well, I’m shocked at how poorly done this was. Don’t pick up Quest for Balance, and if you feel like you must, get it on sale.

A PC Review Copy of Avatar: The Last Airbender – Quest for Balance was provided by GameMill Entertainment for this review.

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Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance

$49.99 USD

1

Score

1.0/10

Pros

• Decent story cutscenes

Cons

• Terrible camera
• Clunky combat
• Bare bones options
• Bland level design
• Character animations can be buggy