Nickelodeon Avatar - The Last Airbender - The Burning Earth

The first Avatar tie-in tried to be a small action-RPG and mostly proved that a licensed team on a TV schedule cannot build one. The follow-up made the smarter call: shrink the scope, flatten the camera, and commit to a brawler. The Burning Earth moves along mostly two-dimensional planes, throws waves of Fire Nation soldiers and Earth Kingdom thugs at you, and asks nothing more complicated than that you learn what each character's bending actually does.

The roster is where the design earns its keep. Aang's air attacks are about crowd control and mobility, Katara works at range with water whips, Toph hits like a dropped boulder and is slow to recover, Zuko is all forward pressure. Swapping between them at set points keeps encounters from settling into one rhythm, and the chi meter that fuels the bigger elemental attacks gives each fight a small resource question. Experience feeds into a modest upgrade tree, so combos lengthen and specials open up as the chapters roll on.

It is a short game, and it does not hide that. Environments follow the second season closely enough that anyone who watched it will recognise the beats, but the levels themselves are corridors with pretty backdrops, and the platforming sections that break up the fighting are the weakest stretches by a distance. Boss encounters lean on pattern reading rather than the combo system, which is a strange thing to do when the combo system is the best part.

On PS2 the presentation is cel-shaded and clean without much technical ambition, which was the correct choice for a show built on flat colour and strong silhouettes. It runs steadily, the voice work draws on cast members familiar from the series, and nothing about it strains hardware that was seven years old by 2007. The other versions of this game are remembered mainly as an achievement joke; the PS2 release has no such baggage and is simply a competent afternoon.

What holds up is the honesty of it. Nobody involved pretended this was more than a compact brawler for viewers who wanted to throw fire at something after an episode, and within that frame it is well made. Play it expecting an hour or three of clean, readable combat and it does not disappoint. Play it expecting the show and you will notice how much of the story happens between levels rather than in them.