Nickelodeon Avatar - The Last Airbender - Into the Inferno

By 2008 the show had reached its ending, and THQ's tie-in line had one job left: put the four elements in a player's hands at the same time. That is the interesting wrinkle in this last of the three Avatar action games. The earlier entries doled out bending in careful licensed portions. Here Aang cycles between air, water, earth and fire on the fly, and the combat is designed around the swap rather than around a single set of combos.

Mechanically it is a straightforward third-person brawler with light puzzle work, the kind of structure that governed most Nickelodeon adaptations of the era. Rooms fill with Fire Nation soldiers, you clear them, you shove a boulder or freeze a stream of water to open the way forward, you move on. Encounters are short and the enemy patterns are simple enough that the element system rarely gets stress-tested. The reward for experimenting is aesthetic more than tactical: earth feels heavy, air knocks crowds down, fire reads fastest.

What holds up better than the fighting is the presentation of the bending itself. The animation team clearly watched the show. Stances telegraph the elements the way they do on screen, and the particle work on the PS2 version, though noticeably softer than the Wii and 360 releases, still sells the difference between a water whip and a fire arc. The voice cast from the series returns, which does a great deal of quiet work in holding the tone together.

The difficulty sits where family-market licensed games of the period always sat: forgiving, generous with checkpoints, unlikely to stop a ten-year-old for long. Adults working through it will finish in an afternoon and find the encounter design thin by the second act.

It is a competent goodbye rather than a definitive adaptation, and its best moments are the ones where it stops fighting the source material and simply lets you stand in the middle of a courtyard turning stone into a weapon.