Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game has the strange shape of a game that reviewers want to protect and interrogate at the same time. That is usually where the more interesting criticism lives. Not in the clean sweep, and not in the easy pile-on, but in the space where a game does one thing so well that people start arguing about how much the rest should matter.
The new 2D fighter, a game critics describe as brilliant in motion but thin around the edges, landed on July 23, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2. TheGamer notes that the project had once been dropped after earlier work at Maximum Entertainment before Gameplay Group International gave it another chance. That rescue-story context matters, because the finished game still feels like something pulled back from the edge: alive, stylish, and a little unfinished.
It also arrives at a demanding moment for fighting games. Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, and Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising have raised expectations around tutorials, netcode, onboarding, lobbies, and ranked play. A licensed Avatar game cannot just look right anymore. It has to teach people how to play, keep them playing, and survive the first week of online matchmaking.
That is where the split begins. IGN scored Avatar Legends an 8/10 and wrote, "The potential of Avatar Legends is immense." Push Square gave it 6/10 and said it is difficult to fully recommend in its current state. TheGamer landed much warmer, calling it "a fantastic fighter" and a "solid contender for 2026's best fighter." That range, roughly 6/10 to 8/10 from the scored reviews I could verify, tells the story better than a single average would. The reviews mostly agree on what works. They split on how much forgiveness a fighting game earns when the fighting is excellent and the surrounding structure is thin.
Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game gets the feel right first
The strongest agreement across the reviews is simple: the combat has a pulse. IGN describes Avatar Legends as a fast, mobility-driven one-on-one fighter built around creative combo expression, a high execution ceiling, and characters who feel meaningfully different from each other. That matters because Avatar, as a show, is not just about elemental powers. It is about bodies in motion. Airbending should not feel like a projectile skin. Earthbending should not feel like a generic heavy punch with brown particles on top. The fighting style has to carry personality.
The reviews suggest that it does. IGN spends a lot of time on the Flow button, the system that gives each character a different movement identity. Aang can use his glider and wind control to attack from strange angles. Azula can move through the air with frightening freedom. Toph can manipulate space by pulling opponents or herself into position. Katara slides and charges in ways that sound closer to choreography than standard zoning. Saltzman's key line is that each fighter has "their own way" of breaking the rules of the system.
TheGamer makes a similar point from the other side, focusing less on match theory and more on fidelity. Its review calls Avatar Legends "a fantastic fighter with tons of depth and well-thought-out mechanics" that fit the series' bending. It also praises the story mode, written around a reality-bending setup by Avatar co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino and series writer Tim Hedrick, as something that feels close to the show rather than a disposable licensed-game excuse.
Push Square is less carried away, but even its lower score is not dismissive. It calls the animation outstanding and says the backgrounds are brought to life with lots of small details. It also notes that the 12-character roster comes with Flow abilities that determine how each fighter plays. That is important. A 6/10 here does not mean the critic thought the core was weak. Push Square's frustration is that the core is promising enough to make the missing support structure feel louder.
The Avatar Legends reviews agree on the same sore spots
The criticisms are remarkably consistent. Avatar Legends sounds like a game with advanced movement and expressive combo routes, but weak tools for teaching people how to reach that fun. That is a serious problem in a modern fighter. The ceiling can be high. Good. It should be. But if the floor is slippery, many players leave before they understand why the game is good.
IGN points to a cumbersome training mode missing standard features, no AI difficulty option in single player, two-player lobbies, and the absence of replay search or replay takeover. Those are not glamorous features, but serious fighting games live or die by them. Replay takeover, in particular, has become one of those quiet modern conveniences that changes how people learn. If you can jump into a lost interaction and test the answer, you are no longer just watching yourself fail. You are studying.
Push Square's complaints overlap almost exactly. It says tutorials are weak, difficulty spikes make the campaign and arcade mode drag, and online lacks ranked play. The line that sticks is blunt: Avatar Legends is difficult to fully recommend right now, not because it is bad, but because it lacks the polish and features expected from a fuller product.
That distinction matters. Reviewers are not asking Avatar Legends to become Street Fighter 6 overnight. They are asking it to meet the baseline expectations that make a technical fighter approachable and durable. If you sell a game around mastery, you need to help people learn. If you build a competitive online game, ranked mode is not decoration. It is how people find fair matches, set goals, and keep returning after the first few bruising nights.
The roughness also changes who the game is for right now. For dedicated fighting game players, missing tutorials might be annoying but survivable. They can lab characters, watch Discord tech, and brute-force their way into understanding. For Avatar fans who show up because they want to play Aang, Korra, Toph, or Azula, those gaps are more dangerous. They may not have the genre vocabulary to know why they are losing. A game can be faithful to Avatar and still lose Avatar fans at the menu.
Why Avatar Legends has critics divided
The split is not really about whether Avatar Legends is good. It is about which part of the game reviewers treat as the center.
If you center the fighting system, the positive read makes sense. A revived licensed 2D fighter with gorgeous animation, a distinct movement mechanic, cross-era Avatar characters, and real combo expression is rare. TheGamer's enthusiasm comes from that place. Its review talks about the story mode, the care for the source material, the combat mechanics, and the sense that the team was right to rescue the project. The phrase "solid contender for 2026's best fighter" is doing a lot of work there. It is not pretending the roster is huge. It is saying the heart of the game works.
If you center the package, Push Square's caution makes just as much sense. Fighting games are long-tail games. They need matchmaking, tutorials, difficulty settings, training options, and quality-of-life details because players do not finish them in a weekend. They return to them, lose at them, learn from them, and slowly build fluency. A thin shell around strong mechanics is still a shell people have to live inside.
IGN sits in the middle, which is probably the most useful place for a buyer. An 8/10 is clearly a recommendation, but the text is loaded with warnings. The review loves the movement, the animation, the adaptation, and the way the support system makes a 12-character roster feel bigger than it is. It also says the game is rough and unpolished. That is not a contradiction. It is the actual state of a lot of memorable fighting games at launch.
The question is whether Avatar Legends gets time. Push Square notes that the developer has promised ongoing support and improvements, but a promise is not a feature. For now, the review picture says this is a game for players who can tolerate rough edges because the match itself feels special. If you are here for single-player comfort, gentle onboarding, or a robust online ladder, the critics are telling you to wait.
What to watch next for Avatar Legends
The first patch cycle will tell us more than the first score average. Difficulty options would immediately help the campaign. Ranked mode would give online players a clearer home. Better tutorials would matter most of all, because they would let Avatar fans become fighting game players instead of asking them to arrive already fluent.
That is the small, human version of the review consensus. Avatar Legends seems to know how bending should feel in a fight. It has style, speed, and the sort of expressive movement that makes people want to talk in training-mode language. It also has the unfinished edges of a rescued project trying to become a long-term game in a genre that remembers everything.
For Perthro readers, that makes it a good one to log carefully rather than rush to label. If you play for systems, you may find something worth sticking with. If you play for polish, you may want to mark it as planned and check back after updates. Either way, the critics are not bored. That is a start.
Sources: IGN's Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game review, TheGamer's Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game review, and Push Square's PS5 review.