The Avatar franchise, not the James Cameron one, is one of the most beloved Western animated franchises since Aang first came out of the iceberg in 2005. The franchise has spawn two separate animated shows (with a third on the way), a Netflix live action series, and an animated movie on the horizon (also a live action one we don’t talk about). But the newest entry in the franchise is coming in just over a month with the release of Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game. At Summer Games Fest this year, we got to go hands on with the game for a few rounds and had a ball with it.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is a 1v1 2D fighting game that features twelve characters from both Avatar: The Last Airbender and its follow up The Legned of Korra. The demo we played featured eight of the characters with all but Korra herself being from the first show. The combat is fluid and learning combos also felt natural and easy and stringing them together was not too complicated when playing on a controller or a fight stick. With such a small roster size for a modern fighting game, each character feels unique in their own way. Even when fighting as two firebenders like Zuko and Azula, neither feels too similar to the other despite sharing the same type of powers. Each character also has three different assist characters you can choose from before starting a match that, while not jumping into battle themselves like in other fighting games, provide some kind of additional passive support.

What really stands about Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is how much love for the franchise the developers have while they made the game. The art design looks like its pulled directly from the shows, in the same vein as Dragon Ball FighterZ does. the characters have a plethora of callbacks to the show like when Toph wins a match she whips out her Earth Rumble championship belt. Plus, all the assist characters are unique to the playable character they’re paired with as they have some type of connection to the character like Sokka having Yue, Suki, or Master Piandao.

 Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is set to release next month on July 23, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, and PC.