I’ve encountered a roadblock in terms of Avatar games. When I opened the case for The Burning Earth on Wii that I bought ages ago, I found a disc for the first game had been sold to me by mistake. And it was too scratched up to work! So while a new copy wings its way to me, I played the GBA version.

It was a bit of a letdown. I completed it in only a couple of hours—it’s the shortest game on the list so far. Like the other Halfbrick games, you use bending and other abilities for both puzzles and combat. And like the Into the Inferno game in particular, the characters are paired up in different combinations (or sometimes solo) in different levels. In this case, the puzzles, combat, and action-y segments are pretty segmented; you’re either doing one or the other, and moving on linearly, a quite plain structure.

This time, the game is built around a scoring system. Presumably this is to encourage replays of its short length. The upper left number is your score, which also acts as health and is restored by defeating enemies. Beating a string of bad guys (only ever the same three types of Fire Nation soldiers, besides the boss fights) also gives a combo bonus, to encourage proper use of your bending abilities. It’s a fairly complex and neat little system. The upper right is a bonus, which ticks down over time and is filled up by collecting jars in the levels, providing the occasional reward for doing something extra or risky.

The sprites, following the previous game, are adorable, and the environments are drawn beautifully. The weakness of the game is that it’s simply retelling the story of Book 2, but severely cut down. It doesn’t have the novelty of the first game’s new plot, and it’s so fast-paced that you have to be familiar with the show to really get it. It does have the advantage of showing Zuko’s side of the story as well, which the DS version was unable to do. What I look for in adaptations are things they’re able to add to the story or world, but the only thing I noticed that wasn’t an adaptation from the show was a reuse of the armadillo wolves from the previous game; they’re used for puzzles rather than combat, which is amusing.

The characters’ abilities are translated to game mechanics in interesting ways, but the score-chasing structure is just something that doesn’t grab me. Despite the aesthetic strengths of the game, I find myself preferring the DS version in this case. Of course, both cover different content, with the desert and Ba Sing Se omitted here but present on DS, and Zuko and Iroh levels here. It’s just so short though, only 7 levels and one of those is more like a minigame. After playing all of Halfbrick’s other games in the series, this was underwhelming to me.