Somehow I don’t think Microsoft envisioned Avatars singeing goblins with fireballs and hacking the arms off of ill-tempered skeletons when they first revealed the bobble-headed doppelgangers, but sure enough, my bell-bottomed stud has developed a bloodlust for the sweet nectar of ogre blood. Kinect might empower me to be the controller, but in Avatar Legends, I am the actual hero. My Avatar is a bona fide master of magic and people’s champ. It’s a bit surreal, wildly ambitious, and quite fun…for awhile.
Avatar Legends is an action RPG where you, or at least your Avatar duplicate, is sucked into a world of displaced Avatars. Nobody knows how they got there or how to return home, but the ostracized Avatars are a resourceful lot, and they’ve managed to set up shops, towns, farms and even an arena for gladiatorial bouts. And then you arrive. Like a balloon-headed King Arthur, your Avatar opens up the fabled chest and wields of the wooden sword of destiny. Excalibur, it’s not, but it does cement your destiny as the fabled one who will lead the helpless Avatars home.
It’s not uncommon for me to dip into second person when writing reviews, but when I say that it’s “your destiny” to rescue the Avatars, I mean it. It’s your destiny, not mine; I quit. The heck with getting home. What’s so bad about a land of beaches, beautiful mountains and scenic sunsets? Sure, goblins might raid the village every once in a blue moon, but that’s nothing compared to real-world problems like natural catastrophes, famine and produce that’s seeking to enact revenge on humanity.
It’s not that Avatar Legends doesn’t have a lot to offer; on the contrary, it might actually have too much to offer. The game is so massively epic that it manages to overstay it’s welcome by, oh, around six hours or so. The general structure of the game is pretty typical: visit a town, acquire a quest, walk somewhere else, kill monsters and return to town. All of the other characters in the game are also Avatars, many of who have quite humorous dialogue trees or personalities, such as the traumatized warrior who convinced himself he was a troll and moved under a bridge.
For around five hours or so, I was entranced with visiting towns and helping farmers, homeless people and other assorted folk with all sorts of problems. Although I would have been eligible for about a billion merit badges, I still had no idea what was going on, and nothing I did seemed even remotely connected to the main plot. Character progression was slow and new weapons and spells were expensive, but at least the leveling system provided some generous skill point allocation. But then I hit the wall of repetition. After it a few hours, it became apparent that the game was nothing more than a collection of loosely connected side missions that all concluded in the same fashion: a smoldering monster carcass and a slightly wealthier hero. It also doesn’t help that combat is about as exiting as studying for a spelling bee.
I dabbled in the online multiplayer, but that is basically a horde mode where you and your buddies fight waves of incoming enemies. The experience and gold are separate from the single-player mode, but there was a surprisingly large amount of games going taking place. That said, the combat was definitely not what I enjoyed in Avatar Legends, so after a few rounds my appetite was thoroughly sated. Perhaps someone more accustomed to the repetition of an MMO would be find the action more compelling, but for me it was tedious.
So I quit. Let someone else save the world, because frankly, it’s just not worth it. I wouldn’t call this a review because I didn’t even come close to finishing the game, but I think I played enough of it to at least justify my opinions. If it seems as if I’m being overly critical, then let me reiterate that I really enjoyed the first few hours of the game, and from a technical perspective, it’s a marvel. It’s an ambitious project in a genre typically reserved for colossal studios whose budgets for designing rocks and dirt far surpass the budget for this entire game. But its mediocre combat and unfocused story really made playing it for more than a few hours a total chore.
Avatar Legends was purchased for $3. You can play a download a free demo on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
By at .
