Avatar Legends The Fighting Game [Preview]: Elemental punching and kicking

Hands-on with fists of fire and wind (and earth and water, too)

With just a few weeks to go until its launch, Avatar Legends is trying to carve its place out of the fighting game landscape. At Summer Game Fest we had the opportunity to go hands-on with the game, and came away fairly interested in what it could offer. Perhaps most importantly it’s not just a fighting game, it’s an extension of the Avatar universe, and could be something that fans of both may want to look into.

Our hands-on experience was essentially a half hour of one-v-one battles utilizing around eight of the game’s fighters. Like other games in the genre, each fighter has unique styles and abilities, but what may set it apart here is just how far the developers, Gameplay Group International, were willing to go with that premise. It’s worth noting that the world of Avatar itself is divided not only into regions but also character eras and arcs, and because each of those requires often vastly different takes on what a character can be that means that how they play and feel in game have to not be watered down, so to speak.

Now, yes, there are basic moves that all the characters can do. There are heavy and light punches, kicks, but there’s also a “Flow” button that is sort of a universal tool related to character-specific movement. Tapping it at the right time can make us parry, combo, dodge, slide — really, anything. It mixes up the play styles by becoming something specific to the era/show that the character is based on.

But that’s just one way that the characters redefine themselves. There are also unique support characters that add one of three enhancements to the player and they’re all different. Aang can choose from Gyatso, Appa and Momo, for instance. Gyatso enhances Aang’s Air Scooter attacks, while Appa can use Flow to cancel normals. And these are different than the supports that Korra or Toph or Azula can have, some of which are moves and others being move enhancers. It’s really a novel system of making our battles even that much more tunable.

Most of all, though, the element-bending abilities of many (not all) of the characters really shine in the game. Aang has something called Avatar State, which can be used once per battle and can greatly enhance the power of all of his offensive attacks, and is only achievable after losing a round and gaining enough Chakra. Korra, on the other hand, has Avatar Cycle which requires her to use elements in a specific order to enhance her next special move. It’s almost a subgame within the main game, and kinda-sorta has the feel of characters coming together from completely different worlds, a la Smash Bros, but it wholly works.

The battles themselves we take on in our demo are best of three, and allow us to attack, defend, use combos, and check out the rather stunning hand drawn animation. It follows along with the style of the show, with appropriate numbers of frames, and really shines on nice monitors.

I’m not much of a fighting game aficionado outside of a handful of series that regularly dip into, but Avatar Legends may just pull me in even if I just want to see what it’s like to have some of these heroes and villains meet up and battle it out. The game releases on July 23 on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch 2.