Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance Review

Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance lets players experience, or re-experience, the epic adventure of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series. The game puts players in the virtual shoes of Aang and his 8 friends in order to explore the most unique locations from the series, solve challenging puzzles, conquer fierce enemies and re-live some of the protagonist’s touching moments from his long running adventures.

Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is a 2.5D adventure/RPG-lite game where players take control of different characters from the Avatar’s universe to conquer enemies and clear puzzles. Each character has two different attacks; a normal and strong attacks. The former can be used non-stop during combat while the latter requires a cooldown/recharge period. Swapping on the fly between characters allows you to pull “combos” combining their various skills.

While in combat, you can thankfully target a specific enemy as sometimes it can be chaotic with 3-5 enemies at once. While combat is pretty simple, you can also find and use consumable items that can either replenish your health or temporarily boost your defense. A nice little touch in case you get in trouble (you most likely won’t). To make things easy, you can assign a consumable to the d-pad for quick usage without menuing.

As you complete quests and side-quests, you’re rewarded with coins and new skills that can be unlocked. Coins can be used to purchase consumables, but you’ll also find special coins that will allow players to unlock newly available skills. Players do have a bit of freedom in terms of upgrading their characters as they can purchase skills in a (limited) skill tree. One of the better features is the boss battles. While you do have some generic battles where you watch the enemy pattern and attack when possible, other battles are intertwined with puzzles.

Additionally, while players can entirely focus on the main story, they’ll find a optional quests peppered throughout each level; such as finding a set amount of acorns, protect a barn from evil-doers. Levels can also be replayed with different characters à la LEGO games. Or exploring every nook and cranny in order to find additional coins through breakable items or treasure chests with some interesting rewards.

The game looks fine, although it could’ve easily been mistaken for a sixth generation console game. While not a huge fan of the tv series, the game looks faithful to the characters, theme and environments from what I remember seeing. Audio side of things, nothing really noteworthy. Voiceover work is decent and enjoyable; except during normal gameplay, characters just blurt out useless one liners. And also, some of the sound bytes sound directly pulled from the Black Panther movie.

There’s nothing inherently wrong here, but it does get a bit tedious and the lack of challenge might be a thorn in “more skilled” gamers. Also not being able to move around the camera is also irritating because you can’t see too far ahead or anything out of direct field of view causing you to waste time and reaching dead ends for example or not seeing/finding the path to go.

Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance is a decent game perfect for younger gamers who are fan of the TV series and want to experience the storylines themselves. For better or for worst, this is clearly a GameMill Entertainment game; decent, mildly enjoyable, slightly too easy but oh so close from being a must play experience. I can only image how much better this could’ve been in the hands of a AAA developer. It’s a fun experience as a whole; worth it’s $20 USD price tag.