Fact: poking a beehive with a stick is more fun than playing “”James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game.”” If you can get past the barely-functional control scheme, broken camera system, ugly character designs and nonexistent plot, you may have a chance at enjoying this game. Me? Not so much.

“”Avatar: The Game”” gives you a choice of which side you’d like to play on, but both campaigns are so thoroughly terrible you’d be doing yourself a disservice to spend $60 on either of them. The Na’vi are controlled like your typical third-person action game, but the melee of controls hurt you more than help you. The human campaign plays like a third-person shooter, and is only marginally better than the Na’vi campaign. This is unfortunate, as the Na’vi had so much potential on paper (as anyone who’s seen the movie could attest). But the developers fail to execute on nearly every single good idea. The entire campaign suffers from severe camera problems as well, in some instances inducing slight motion sickness.

The only positive thing the game offers is the beautifully realized world of Pandora faithfully recreated from the movie, but to see most of it you will have to suffer through well over 10 hours of horrid gameplay.

The game includes a multiplayer mode, but the same issues that affect the campaign also plague this section. Forget about playing it for very long, because you will get bored, you will die a lot and you will fail to do anything impressive. In fact, the only impressive thing happening will be the amount of people you manage to verbally abuse while being given a crash course in how to hate your own life.

“”Avatar: The Game”” is perhaps the greatest waste of your well-earned cash so far this year. If you have any interest in spending your money well and enjoying a well-made product, do yourself a favor: don’t play this game and see the movie instead.

Score: 4/10