The New Avatar Game Sounds Pretty Bad

Avatar The Last Airbender Quest for Balance screenshot

There’s a new Avatar game out now – the one with the elements, not the blue people – and there’s no easy way to put it: it looks like it’s pretty bad. Not a lot of professional reviews exist for the game, which is a bit of a red flag in and of itself, but the few that do exist are not positive, and the game’s Steam reviews tell a very similar story.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Quest for Balance was developed by Peruvian developer Bamtang games and published by GameMill Entertainment for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Bamtang has a long history of developing licensed games, some decent and others… not so much. GameMill is in a pretty similar spot, and the two have worked together on games like Nickelodeon Kart Racers, Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2, and Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3. Did you know that there were three games in that series? I sure didn’t.

GameMill says Quest for Balance is a co-op action-adventure game that lets you “relive the epic adventure of the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series,” while playing as 9 different characters and solving environmental puzzles. On paper that doesn’t sound too bad, and the trailer (embedded below) actually makes it seem alright.

So far, one professional review of the game exists, from IGN (we asked for a review copy and didn’t receive a response). Reviewer Tom Marks says that the game has “awful combat, bottom-of-the-barrel quests and … a healthy coating of jank.” They also say that the game is filled with recycled enemies and an inexplicable Temple Run-like minigame that gets used far too many times.

But hey, that’s just one review, right? Maybe other players are having more fun. Nope. At the time of writing, Steam lists 47 reviews for Quest for Balance, and 70% of them are negative. Steam complaints mirror IGN’s review, but also say the game has terrible voice acting, outright broken game mechanics, and is priced way too high at $50. Bummer.

The Avatar series, unfortunately, seems to be cursed with bad games. It started back in the PS2 era, with a trio of games that were… fine. They were fine! But they weren’t particularly great, even at the time. Since then, most games based on the series were filled with minigames or based on the live-action movie, which, y’know.

The only game that’s gotten close to being good was PlatinumGames’ The Legend of Korra, which wasn’t great but at least had a lot of heart. Unfortunately, even if you wanted to play that game, you couldn’t — it was delisted from digital storefronts years ago.

The Avatar series is gearing up to gain its second second wind, with a new live-action series on the way from Netflix, a new animated film focused on Aang, a new series, and multiple movies, comics, and more in development. Avatar Studios says that new games are part of that push, and we can only hope that among one of them is something truly good.