Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game

“One thing I was really surprised with was going into the story mode to suddenly get annihilated by the AI. I was expecting maybe a tutorial for the first mission to teach a few basic combos or for the AI to be a bit slower or easier initially, but it just thrusts you straight into it. I'm not amazing with these types of fighting games, but I’m not horrible either, and it took me ages just getting thrashed by the first mission until I started to get it. For me, I have fun learning new things and it kept me engaged whilst I learned, but I know a lot of other people wouldn’t find it fun with trial by fire. I think the game would benefit a lot if you could select different difficulties with the AI/story mode.”

“The story mode is genuinely scuffed to a disappointing amount. There's no noticeable issues at first besides needing to level up characters to be able to use special moves and such at first, but later in the story once you get to what are supposed to be the 'boss' fights they are horribly scuffed to the point they have no proper mechanics and need to be cheesed because of the damage they do and how tanky they are or they legit spam the same move the entire fight until you're dead.”

“I am not someone who is very versed in fighting games like Street Fighter but am a huge fan of Avatar. When purchasing this game I expected proper tutorials and a story campaign that slowly got harder. I trained for hours but the lack of consideration left me losing over and over again. To complete the first chapter they immediately threw me in against Katara who had pretty smart AI but to 'nerf' it they just made her stand still after losing half your health. Then I had to beat Kyoshi and then fight Toph twice without losing twice to her; otherwise, I would have to start from round one against Toph again, losing my chapter progress for that session. Also, Aang is really hard to play so why they made him the main character for the story mode I have no idea. This game is not hard, just unforgiving to beginners of the genre.”

“Some characters have flat out unfinished animations, combo trials don't work, there's graphical bugs on Intel drivers, there's no ranked, multi-person lobbies, or spectating, and there's no graphics options to drop the resolution, play windowed/borderless, or anything like that.”

“There are no graphical settings, made worse by how weirdly unoptimized the full release is whereas I had no issues during the beta (also wants 4GB VRAM as a minimum despite being your usual 2D fighter [as an example, that's more than what GGStrive, a game with high quality 3D visuals, asks for]).”

“The downside is that it launched a bit rushed in terms of features, lacking some graphics options and ranked mode, but with those coming this might very well be a fighting game that rivals Strive and SF6 for me.”

“The soundtrack is so mid, which is an absolute crime for this franchise. It's trying to imitate the original, but it fails terribly. They should just reuse the show's soundtrack instead of this wishy-washy attempt at a recreation.”

“My biggest gripe: wish they could have got some of the original music. The music here is okay, but the original music would really make it feel more like Avatar.”

“Ive played for an hour and a half and the music feels too repetitive already.”

“If you want to do combo trials, to have an easier time in story mode, or are invested in wanting to play Avatar Aang or Nightmare Korra, wait for some patches because these are all unfinished or buggy. The game needed more time in the oven to be feature complete (Ozai is just missing some visuals, he's pretty polished from what I've seen otherwise).”

“A quarter of the playable character roster is completely unfinished, basic features such as online lobbies for more than 2 people are not present, several things in the tutorials and combo trials are buggy or outright broken (look at the "demo" replay for Sokka's final intermediate trial lmao).”

“Even online is still plagued with buggy matchmaking, and potentially game breaking bugs.”

“Where are the game's graphics and performance settings? This game lags a lot in fullscreen mode (my PC is good enough to run all the other fighting games out right now) and I'm tired of going to game files to change any settings or figure out what might be causing it. It's ridiculous.”

“I am eager to continue learning the mechanics of this game, but in its current state, I'm afraid this isn't possible without further intervention. It's clear this game was not optimized to befriend new players, whether casual fans of the original television series or devout fighting-game maniacs.”

“And I'm not sure if this is because I'm playing on Steam Deck, but there's a few stages (specifically the water tribe-based ones) that cause some serious performance issues - I thought it was a multiplayer thing, but even in singleplayer, this happens.”

“The combos getting reset during execution and the extensive grinding needed for all achievements made the process very frustrating.”

“The developers designed the game assuming players have already spent months or years grinding, with a lack of effective tutorials and training modes that fail to teach new players properly.”

“For the same price or less, other fighting games offer larger rosters, better beginner tools, and more content for players once they are tired of grinding regular matches.”

“Feels like a cash grab due to the hype surrounding the new movie, which sucks because I was really excited for this game's release.”

“Game was clearly just rushed as yet another cash grab.”

“It's not just a cash grab like most show-based games; it's actually a good fighting game with mostly balanced characters, although I do wish we had more characters and not locked behind a deluxe edition paywall.”

“I tried my best not to refund, but aside from a basic arcade mode and casual 1v1's online with no ranked mode or spectating, and only 2-player lobbies, the story mode for Avatar is barebones and boring. There's nothing of value in this game besides the Avatar name.”

“Broken features, audio glitches, very boring story content, and no ranked mode for competitive players make this release a miss.”

“Mechanically, it is an interesting pastiche of a lot of other modern fighters and they've clearly tried to cater to a lot of different styles with the characters (e.g., you've got pretty traditional shotos, but you've also got triangle jump stuff with Ozai, some very technical movement characters, etc.), but it lacks a ranked mode and though I appreciate how faithfully they recreated the character designs, the animations look awful.”

“Unfortunately, it was rushed to market so it's in sort of an unfinished state, but what's there is a rock-solid fighting engine, creative character designs (even the more basic characters still have interesting twists on their classic archetypes), and tons of love for the source material.”

“The story is short and quite easy, with no real replay value once complete.”

“I'll probably pick it up on sale once they add more playable characters.”