After years in exile, Avatar fans can finally dust off their air gliders. The long-awaited Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is making its way to streaming, marking the series’ film debut and first animated installment since The Legend of Korra wrapped in 2014. If that wasn’t enough, there’s another franchise first launching on the same day, one that fulfills a want that’s been around since Aang first stumbled out of a glacier: Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is the first good Avatar video game.
Through nuanced systems and an encyclopedic knowledge of the source material, developer Gameplay Group International largely does right by Team Avatar. The game is fast and fluid, offering room for player expression that will keep genre sickos practicing expressive movement tricks and combos until they’re moving like a master bender. Thankfully, these elements are compelling, because the somewhat lackluster single player modes work against a whole that isn’t in perfect balance.
This isn’t to imply that Avatar Legends only excels at abstract gameplay considerations, because it takes great care in faithfully adapting the series into a fighting game. It stays true to its source material with a roster whose playstyles perfectly line up with their in-show counterparts. Aang’s abilities are puckish, letting him perform four-way mix-ups, movement cancels, and other shenanigans that will give his foes a headache. Azula thrives on perfection, Korra charges headfirst into battle, and Toph players almost certainly eat rocks. The gang very much looks the part as well, thanks to hand-drawn animation that skillfully emulates the show’s art style. It may not quite reach the aesthetic peaks of something like Arc System Works’ Dragon Ball FighterZ, but it authentically recreates these characters’ likenesses and iconic moves, working as a greatest hits collection.
As for where Avatar Legends fits into the genre, it’s a speedy one-versus-one 2D fighting game with a heavy emphasis on character-specific movement. Unlike the more deliberate pace of Street Fighter or “anime” style titles where every combatant can airdash after jumping, these benders move in ways that fit their element and vibe. Aang uses his glider to weave through the skies, changing approach angles to throw off his foes. Katara shoots off ice ramps like an Olympic ski jumper, creating dirty cross-ups.
These traversal techniques are tied to the Flow button and are central to what gives this game so much room for player expression. Flow abilities can be canceled into each other, letting you juke and weave across the stage in unpredictable patterns as you turn yourself into a heat-seeking missile with firebending or reposition with stone pillars. However, if you spam these cancels too often, you risk draining the Flow meter and becoming “unbalanced,” meaning you can’t use Flow moves until the bar naturally recharges. (For those in the know, this is very similar to Street Fighter 6’s drive system.) Over the course of a match, you’ll also gain Chakra, which lets you perform more powerful EX moves and supers — standard stuff. As for the other basics, each character has special moves that can be performed with quarter-circle forward and quarter-circle back motions.
At first glance, things seem a bit simplistic compared to something like Street Fighter 6. Characters only have a few special moves and three attack buttons (light, medium, and heavy), but when you combine these tools with the Flow movement, there is ample room for creativity. Sokka players have already turned him into a vortex of boomerangs and sword slashes, and Zaheer breaks the rules by calling in assists like he’s playing Marvel vs. Capcom.
If this sounds complicated, the good news is that there’s an autocombo system that lets new players mash the light attack button to perform a combo. There’s a relatively low barrier to entry but a long road to mastery, which is exactly what many fighting game players want. A big complaint among genre fans is that the space has trended toward simplification in recent years. This hasn’t really made these games “easier” to get into, because seasoned players will still throttle newcomers; it just makes it so that veterans are likely to get bored more quickly. By contrast, Avatar Legends’ nuanced bending seems like it could offer layers of compelling decision-making for the long term. Between its freeform battles and solid netcode, there’s plenty of incentive to pursue mastery.
The roster was given a lot of love, thoughtfully adapting these characters’ personalities while referencing both iconic moments and deep-cut novel details alike.
Not everyone wants to dedicate their lives to practicing Azula’s tricky “Just Frame” combos, and many Avatar fans will check out the game simply because it’s based on their favorite series. That’s where Avatar Legends runs into issues. While games like Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat give players who never want to hop online something to do, this does not. To be fair, Avatar Legends doesn’t cost as much as those full-priced titles — it’s $29.99 compared to Mortal Kombat 1’s launch price of $69.99 — but that doesn’t change how virtually everything outside its core battles is quite rough.
The story mode, which is based on an outline by series co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino, combines short visual novel-style conversations with even shorter fights. The enemy AI isn’t particularly fun to battle, as these bots waver between pulling off omniscient throw reads and repeatedly walking into your fireballs from full screen like a Level 1 CPU. There are loose attempts at introducing RPG mechanics, but these elements are half-baked and barely affect gameplay.
The narrative fares a bit better, even if it boils down to a seemingly non-canonical “filler” episode. Due to convoluted specifics, a smattering of characters from The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra end up together in a fractured reality, as they’re forced to uncover who drew them here and why. Most of these familiar faces aren’t acting like themselves, leading to weird situations like Azula and Korra being besties. It admittedly comes across like poorly conceived fan-fiction at first, but eventually these alternate personalities begin to crack, forcing the characters to question who they really are. There are a few compelling asides, particularly when it comes to villains attempting to reconcile their past wrongs, but ultimately, the lackluster presentation and so-so battles against AI enemies mean this mode won’t be enough for most single player-only types.
In some ways, this is pretty par for the course when it comes to fighting games. Outside ambitious cases like the upcoming Virtua Fighter: Crossroads, many games in the genre don’t have the bandwidth to deliver nuanced multiplayer and a fully featured offline experience. In Avatar Legends’ case, a big issue is that it could do a better job of guiding those who enjoy the latter to the former.
When it comes to onboarding, Avatar Legends is a mixed bag. While its generalized tutorial lays out the basics, it isn’t quite as comprehensive as something like Mortal Kombat, which explains genre-specific terms and concepts that give newbies a fighting chance. The character-specific tutorials fare a bit better. The most innovative element is that these guides let players slow down each input step-by-step, essentially turning learning into a rhythm game. It’s a cool idea, but the issue is that what’s taught is pretty dang specific, mostly dishing out non-optimal combos and particular setups, as opposed to a broad game plan.
Even genre veterans will find some of these elements lacking, like the training mode, which is a mixed bag. It has advanced tools such as frame data bars, which tell you exactly how long it takes for a move to start and end, but it lacks basic functionality like the ability to make the training dummy block some of the time and not others. Altogether, it’s a solid learning environment, but one that won’t quite bring Avatar fans who’ve never touched an arcade stick up to speed.
Much of this comes down to the fact that Avatar Legends is clearly coming in hot. The team recently revealed that two characters, Avatar Aang and Nightmare Korra, are ostensibly only partially finished, with updates coming in the future that will further distinguish them from their base counterparts. While they are both playable at the moment and are surprisingly unique compared to the rest of the roster — Avatar Aang is a skybound zoner while Nightmare Korra moves almost exclusively through teleports — each has a few recycled attacks from the normal versions of characters.
Similarly, Fire Lord Ozai is incomplete in the prerelease review version we played. He’s missing certain animations and was reworked so late that it was difficult to get a feel for the character. Additionally, we haven’t been able to play the ranked mode, which, if poorly implemented, could be a death blow for hardcore players. It comes across like a rush to release the game in time for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender’s streaming debut led to compromises, ones especially felt when it comes to the training options.
This mixed onboarding is a bummer because, despite what you may have heard, fighting games can be for everyone. The thing separating most skilled players from button mashers isn’t intrinsic natural talent, but a lot of time spent practicing and getting demolished. This game’s upfront simplicity makes it a bit easier to jump into than you’d expect, letting neophytes experience tense battles where hand-drawn animation and snappy movement sell each blast of wind, water, and fire. The roster was given a lot of love, thoughtfully adapting these characters’ personalities while referencing both iconic moments and deep-cut novel details alike.
It’s a shame then that Avatar Legends doesn’t do more to keep around fans of the series who would enjoy these many homages, but don’t want to get cooked online. Hopefully, there’s a lot of overlap between Avatar fans and those willing to brave an Agni Kai, because otherwise, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game may struggle to find the audience that it deserves.
Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game will be released July 23, 2026, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a prerelease download code provided by PM Studios. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
