I should start by saying I recently became a fan of the cartoon (thanks to netflix instant streaming!) and I doubt anyone who's not a fan and is more than 10 years old could enjoy it very much.
By "AAA" standards it is definitely a by-the-numbers action platformer, but this is a world of improvement for anyone who tried the abomination that was the first game (subtitled simply The Last Airbender), which tried to bring sloppy, half-assed, weird dungeon crawling RPG-ish gameplay (complete with upgradeable equipment) while not following the excellent story of the series at all.
By comparison, Burning Earth starts right off the bat with stuff right out of Book 2, with dialogue and even cinematic moments taken right out of the show! I was so relieved that I was able to overlook that the first cinematic was silent (sound glitch), and the animation while much improved is sometimes iffy, with AI characters jumping across the screen to do their next action and characters in cinematics sometimes moving their mouths with the dialogue but more often not doing so. Another vast improvement that jumped out at me was the presentation, from the snazzy main menu to the greatly increased amount of voiceover (in the first game you were stuck with tons of hard to read text & it was obviously written by the Australian devs with little care taken - one NPC even called me "mate")
To be fair, at time of writing (1:45AM 1/17/10) I have only played this game for about 10 minutes, currently part way through the 2nd level. It seems like most of the complaints about this game is the repetitiveness and ease of the gameplay, but the platforming controls are solid enough and serviceable, and the combat is polished up quite a bit from the previous installment (there's even striking similarities to God of War, with the fixed sweeping camera and streamlined orb-based health & upgrade system), and by crikey its a kids game based on a cartoon - they tried deeper gameplay and it was horrible. I'm impressed so far at the increased faithfulness to the series, but if my opinion changes of course I'll edit this review
