The Legend of Korra, the follow-up to the popular Avatar: The Last Air Bender series centres around Korra, a young girl from the water tribe who is the incarnation of Avatar Aang from The Last Air Bender.  She is destined to have the great powers of the avatar which allows her to control all four elements (water, air, fire and earth).  The current cartoon series displays her growth and knowledge at learning the four elements while the recently released game starts off with her already having the powers right at the beginning.

After spending some time with the game, I think it has a very good combat system which could be compared to Metal Gear Rising / Bayonetta. Each button is assigned with a specific move and can be linked together to create combos. There are also advanced techniques such as combo cancelling where you can use the dodge move to skip a combo and go to the next move.  As mentioned, Korra has the ability to use all four types of element bending; each one has their own unique combos. You can freely switch the type of bending as long as it is unlocked. To unlock it’s just the simple method of just playing through the story.

Out of all the bending elements, I personally believe that Air bending was the most overpowered and useful, however this only gets unlocked later in the game. It is so easy to play the game with it due to the range and combos you are able to pull off.  On the other end of the spectrum, I’d say the worst bending element for me would be fire. It lacked power and was much harder to preform combos with compared to earth and water. I was able to complete the game at the hardest difficulty using just Air, Earth and Water bending, though Earth was only used for bosses which required it sadly as it is quite slow and with higher difficulty, it is more punishing if you get hit.

Since the game is supposed to be based on the cartoon series, I thought they might be using the story line from the series to make it an interesting adaptation for fans however, I eventually found that to be wrong. The story in the game is actually very short which was very surprising to me. The game starts with Korra at a pro-bending tournament where you have to defeat 3 guys to win it. After winning the tournament, Korra gets attacked by a mysterious gang called Equalists who sealed away her bending abilities by using some sort of Chi darts.  A evil and mysterious old man laughs and teleports away which assumed to me was the final boss.  It was now up to Korra to travel to the air temple to get her bending powers back while fighting many dark spirits and giant robots, which made the game slightly repetitive in terms of enemy designs. (A tip for anyone who will be playing this game, don’t even bother blocking electrical attacks as I personally haven’t been able to do so)

Naga, a female polar bear also accompanies you throughout the journey to help travel between each area which involves a short mini game which is like Temple Run or Crash Bandicoot’s 1 hog racing.  You need to navigate between cars, holes, bridges and even giant robots to reach to the end of the level.  Even though the levels are completely easy on normal mode; on the max difficulty I was stuck trying to beat the robots on 1 level for roughly 30 minutes due to the insane idea of giving the player 1 life (1 hit and your dead).  Good thing they had a checkpoint or I would be pretty frustrated.

The game took around 3-4 hours to complete for me which was pretty simple to get through.  As mentioned previously the hard difficulty did take a bit more time due to a certain level however overall that took around 5 hours max as well.

Outside the story mode, there is also a small challenging mini game called Pro Bending where you in a 3 vs 3 tournament.  You are assisted with 3 AI team members as well who does Earth/Fire bending.

This mini game was also considerably easy at the beginning however at higher difficulty it was very hard for me to try go for a ring out as my AI companions were too dumb and often get hit too easy.  This resulted in me trying to go for a face off each round or try and capture as much area as I can.  The tournament consists of 5 rounds and if you lose, you can still restart at the same round which was a nice feature especially at higher difficulty.

Review Summary

Overall the game is a mix of elements which are implemented well and some which aren't. The combat system is a nice designed feature which I enjoyed a lot though it is very punishing for people who have a hard time to get to gripes with the system. The story however is somewhere it is lacking and didn't have enough excitement and punch to it. Fans of the avatar series can give it a try however it is not as closely linked to the cartoon series as I would have liked, which disappointed me slightly.