Our live but hands-off Avatar game demo showed our human character piloting an air vehicle above Pandora and blowing up some of the planet's floating islands in order to get to its destination (the humans are depicted in both the game and movie as being technologically advanced but not caring much about the environment). After landing in a base our adventures in Pandora began as our human soldier encountered several of the world's alien species.

On Pandora there are several alien animals to deal with such as a wolf-like pack of creatures that tend to blend with the environment and huge rhino-like animals that charge at you and the other soldiers. You also have some nasty alien plant life that will use their tentacles or their acid stings to take you out In addition to weapons such as machine guns and flame throwers, humans also can access special (if temporary) abilities such as cloaking themselves from view. You also get to drive more vehicles including the one-man mech that was seen in the Avatar movie trailer

Visually the Avatar game uses the Far Cry 2 graphics engine and it showed in our demo. The game's dense jungle environments looked incredible (and did we mention it was in 3D?) and character models were highly imaginative.At the end of the demo we got to see the game via the playable Na'vi form that your character puts his mind in later in the game. You get to be more agile in the game as you maneuver in the jungle and using native weapons like the bow and arrow. We were told that you play as both human and Na'vi until a certain point where you much make a choice; remain a human and stick it out with them or turn into a Na'vi full time and join the alien race. Multiplayer is also a part of the Avatar game but Ubisoft isn't talking much about that part of the game yet.

While the 3D effects need a special monitor and special glasses to see, it's looking like the Avatar game will look and play well enough without them. Cameron claimed during E3 that he wanted the Avatar game to be an exception in the poor showing of movie-to-game adaptations and based on our PAX 2009 demo we think Ubisoft has a shot at making an exceptional movie game.