Elements Divided Swings For Chaotic Multiplayer Avatar And Comes Pretty Close

We've seen a bit of Avatar: The Last Airbender in VR before, thanks to the rocksteady Rumble. However, that's only about earthbending. If you're looking for something where you can play around with all four elements, then pay attention to Elements Divided because it could well be just what you're after. It's not officially an Avatar game - what a world that would be - but it does a darn good job of letting you play around with water, fire, earth, and air.

I recently went hands-on with the Steam version via Quest 3 and things kick off with the tutorial, where you jump around a bit and other standard stuff. You then learn to punch, a movement you'll likely never use, and block. Then you choose your element. You can change the element later on but, and I'll get to this, mastering one first really pays off. Your element teaches you three moves, and then you're free to either go into single-player or hop online for multiplayer.

Single-player is a good warm-up that helps you get used to moving around. More importantly, you'll earn new skills as your elemental mastery levels up. This is crucial because jumping into multiplayer, which is the main attraction here, is truly awful if you've not unlocked a couple of movement abilities for your element. Each element has unique moves and I went with air, which means my movement skills started when I could swing a magical air sword at the floor to fly high.

Eventually, I gained the ability to turn that sword into a glider when in the air to freely move around, or into a giant wheel on the floor for incredible speed. Once you've got these abilities, you can go into multiplayer matches in earnest because otherwise you'll feel like Sokka does in Avatar, just without his comedic charms.

Multiplayer itself is always battle-based, though there are a few different options. The worst option here is rounds. This has your “teams” fighting it out to get two wins in total. I don't dislike this idea, but dying early means you can't play for the rest of the round, which is rather dull. You've then got stock matches where everyone has three lives, while time has everyone playing for the most amount of time overall. The latter two are more enjoyable, a bit snappier, and also involve more actual playing at any skill level.

Combat initially feels a little odd, though it starts to flow a lot better as you unlock more abilities. Playing for an hour should have most skills unlocked for one element, and at that point you can move around with ease in various ways. You can aim to knock people off the arena, take them out as they're fighting one another, or get into some intense duels. It becomes considerable fun, but the early moments with each element feel really sluggish. Keep that in mind because it gets significantly better very quickly, though you won't get to that if you don't put in a couple of rounds first.

Overall, Elements Divided feels like an incredibly cool addition to the world of VR brawlers. I'd love to see something like this taken into an open-world RPG, yet it's still an amazing experience as a multiplayer brawler. The matches are fast enough to just hop in for some quick rounds whenever else you have spare time, and frenetic enough that you'll work up a bit of a sweat doing so.

Elements Divided is out now on the Meta Quest platform and Steam.