Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance Review

After waiting for a very long time since the game was announced, Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance was released. It is a 3D action-adventure game directly based on the original show and was developed by Bamtang Games and published by GameMill Entertainment.

There are nine playable characters, including Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Toph. The game contains 18 chapters of various events throughout the show and lets you explore the locations where these events took place. Throughout Quest for Balance, you slowly learn more skills and unlock more bending types and forms.

The story follows major events that happened during the show and is told through the White Lotus members. It begins with Aang’s decision to run away from the Southern Air Temple, and that scene acts as a tutorial; after you get through it, the actual game begins with the important scenes from the first episode of the show, The Boy in the Iceberg. The tutorial feels forced and only there to introduce us to the basic game mechanics, which makes the start of the game a lot worse than it could have been. Aang’s character arc has seemingly been swapped, and instead of learning to stand up for himself and grow up to be a strong person, apparently, he needs to be less stubborn, which is the complete opposite of what it was in the show and should be. Aang is the only character that the game cares about, and the rest of the main cast doesn’t get any development. The locations that are being explored and expanded on in the game make sense, as they are some of the more important parts of the world of Avatar.

There are unskippable and very slow tutorials for simple and annoying things, such as setting quest markers or opening the map. More important gameplay mechanics, like being unable to target and hit bosses at certain times, aren’t explained or introduced at all, and the player is left to play “guess the boss mechanics” in order to continue with the game. The puzzles don’t make any sense but are very easy to beat anyway — there aren’t any obstacles blocking the path forward if Aang would just move a few centimetres aside, but if it’s a bit too far from the centre of the screen, it’s unreachable. Combat is boring and very unresponsive, and the skill tree doesn’t make it any better. Between actual levels, there are short Subway-Surfers-like mini-games that don’t add anything to the game but more playtime and aren’t fun or meaningful in any way whatsoever. Trying to understand where to go is genuinely difficult because nothing is explained, and the level design is awful. Overall, the gameplay is absolutely terrible; it feels as if a LEGO game had its assets changed and its combat slightly reworked.

Graphically, Quest for Balance isn’t very pleasant on the eyes — it has the same look mobile games from 2010 do. The camera is absolutely terrible almost all the time, and there are assets that feel like placeholders that just were never changed — every female character with Water Tribe getup is Katara with small, almost impossible-to-see changes. There are some missing assets, too, like people shovelling dirt without a shovel. The animations are terrible, even compared to older Avatar games: ice melting is just a PNG getting smaller and throwing objects is just the object flying diagonally into the target without any regard for how it should look.

The game has sound effects that sound very similar to those from older The Legend of Zelda games, which feels very unoriginal. There is barely any voice acting for the characters, although there are full cutscenes that do include that, which makes me wonder even more why there isn’t voice acting for the rest of the game. Music is also not original, and a lot of the tracks used in the show are reused in the game, although that’s not really a problem with how great they are. The sound effects that are new, such as some combat sounds, aren’t particularly bad but aren’t good as well.

Quest for Balance is filled with bugs that impact every aspect of the game in various ways: enemies can hurt you without any animation or indicator that they did; your health just goes down. The friendly AI doesn’t know how to fight and just runs into the enemy… without attacking. Coins and collectables can just fall out of bounds and be unreachable. Shops and other UI elements such as the menu just trap you inside them until you alt+f4 or interact with something and hope it will work after. And the local co-op, which could have been very interesting and fun, just doesn’t work — there is no way to control the character the other player should play as.

Overall, Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance is riddled with issues and feels terrible to play. The enemy hitboxes are awful, and hitting an enemy is impossible without locking on to them. A lot of things just make no sense, like going into water being somehow lethal to characters, including Katara, who is a waterbender. It’s not fun at all, and you’re better off spending that £39.99 on anything else instead of this.