In James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, you arrive on the distant world Pandora, hand-picked to take part in the Avatar Program, a little known scientific initiative launched by the RDA Corporation, which is mining Pandora for rare minerals. You learn to pilot your own avatar, a hybrid of your DNA and that of Pandora's indigenous species, the Na'vi. As you venture further into the Pandoran jungle, you learn more about its many creatures of Pandora, the Na'vi, and their struggle with the Corporation to save Pandora At the flashpoint of this conflict, you must decide where your true allegiance lies: Do you fight alongside the RDA, attempting to alter the course of a conflict spiraling quickly out of control? ... or do you join the Na'vi, battling to protect Pandora from the onslaught of the RDA?

At first the player is allowed to choose the appearance of the character from a set of pre-defined faces, although not the name. After the player has chosen a side, each side the player chooses offers different gameplay, weapon set, skill set, and environment.

As a Soldier, the player is equipped with firearms such as assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers. The soldier generally have to eliminate the enemies, which are fast and resilient and usually charging towards the player, from afar. Playing as an Avatar limits the player to only one Avatar-issued machine gun and various primitive weapons such as bows, crossbows and melee weapons. The Avatar player usually has to charge the enemies since ranged weapon are either weak (the machine gun), have slow rate of fire (bows and crossbows), or have limited ammunition; however, the human enemies are generally weak and the basic foot soldiers can die in one hit. The environment also reacts differently to the character: many plants will attack the soldier, while the Avatar can walk past said plants unharmed. A variety of vehicles or mounts are also available to each race.

If the player's health is reduced to 0, s/he can use a Recovery that instantly recovers to full health. Recoveries can be acquired by gathering cell samples left behind by killed creatures (including Humans or Na'vi) or plants, but only 5 Recoveries can be carried at any one time. Avatar players can collect Cell Samples more easily from many plants without having to "kill" them. If the player falls to his death, however, he cannot use Recoveries and have to reload from a check point which is automatically saved. The game offers no way to manually save when playing the game (it is only saved when player reach certain points, completed an objective, or quit the game). A special case involves a separate checkpoint when the user decides which race to side with, which cannot be overwritten.

As the player completes mission objectives or eliminates opposition, the character gains experience points and levels up. The leveling up process is quite linear, with no way to customize the character. Each level rewards the character with better version of the weapon, armor and skills she/he already has. The character can have only 1 armor, 4 skills and 4 weapons equipped into quick slot at any one time. The skills can be offensive (boost damage, summon air strikes / wild life), defensive (boost damage resistance, heal) or of general purpose (boost speed, invisibility).

Experience points is also converted to credits that is used in the Conquer minigame. It is a Risk-style strategy game in which the player captures territories from enemies. Credits is used to buy troops (which has 3 types: infantry, heavy ground unit and air unit), defenses or limited special attacks.

Note: During installation, press the Ignore button when the CRC error for a ReadMe_uk.txt file appears.