Since the 2009 release of Avatar, many around the world have often wondered what it would be like to wander around the magical world of Pandora. James Cameron and his brilliant visual effects team did such a fantastic job bringing that world to life that it left fans clamoring to explore Pandora themselves. While that may be impossible in reality, the world of games holds potential for that kind of experience. Enter Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, an open-world action game that puts players in the shoes of a Na’vi to explore the jungles, plains and mountains of Pandora. With plenty of beauty and potential, does Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora offer the ultimate Avatar experience or is this experience just a pretty face with little substance beneath the surface?
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora takes place around the events of Avatar: The Way of Water, but far away from the events of Jake Sully and his family. The game follows the ‘Sarentu’ and his allies as they escape the clutches of the Resource Development Administration (RDA) after years of imprisonment. Now free, the Sarentu must join the Resistance to unite the Na’vi clans, push back the RDA, and discover what happened to their clan.
The Avatar series has never been the best at storytelling, often wrapping their paper thin plots in beautiful visuals and breathtaking setpieces. Unfortunately, the same is true of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. If you playedFar Cry 6, then the plot shouldn’t be that surprising. There are three clans that need your help and it’s up to you to solve their problems so they can join the Resistance. The major differences here is that you don’t get to choose the order you recruit the clans, and the game lacks a strong antagonist.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s story is lengthy and filled with many characters, but it lacks urgency and memorable personalities. For a game set in a fantastical world, the story is paint-by-numbers and derivative of other Ubisoft titles. That’s until the final third of the game comes around and sheds the Resistance plotline to focus on more personal matters. Focusing on just a few characters and delving deep into their trauma, this section delivers real weight and powerful storytelling the first two-thirds lack. It’s a mighty shift in the narrative’s favor and it’s a shame the rest of the story never focused on fleshing out just a handful of characters as they attempt to come to terms with their past and what it means to be Na’vi and Sarentu.
Unfortunately, the finale reverts to its paint-by-numbers nature. Despite high stakes and truly astounding setpieces leading up to the ending, the grand finale lacks catharsis. Much of this has to do with the terrible antagonists, as both rarely show up in the campaign and never feel like they have much presence in the Sarentu’s story until the very end. It’s an unfortunate way to end the story after such a fantastic final third.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a lengthy adventure that will take you anywhere between 20-30 hours depending on difficulty and RNG loot drops. The story has its moments, but it never escapes the shadow of better told games about forming a resistance. It’s also a story that comes off as intentionally held back by some very Ubisoft design decisions.
The world of Pandora is wide and vast, yet beautifully crafted and brought to life by Massive Entertainment. This new continent of Pandora feels richly populated with its own ecosystem of animals to hunt, fauna to gather, Na’vi to meet, and soaring skies to fly across. While it is easy to compare Avatar to Far Cry, Massive Entertainment has built out a world that’s more striking and wondrous than many of Far Cry’s locations. It’s even managed to add some very Na’vi touches to traditional mechanics like gathering and hunting. A new minigame requires you to gather resources in a proper manner to get the most pristine versions of them. Likewise, the Na’vi’s respect for the animals of Pandora informs the hunting, tasking players to mercifully kill animals to get the best resources. Use a machine gun and the entire hunt is ruined.
The world is split into three distinct zones that house wildly different biomes. The Kinglor Forest provides the most familiar Avatar experience by giving players a lush jungle with massive trees to bound across. Meanwhile, the Upper Plains offer wide open stretches of land to gallop across. Finally, the Clouded Forest offers amazing heights and deep valleys to explore. Each area is beautifully crafted, though the Plains and Clouded Forest rarely match up to the beauty of the Kinglor Forest. The Clouded Forest in particular feels small and less impressive compared to the other two biomes.
It’s the activities that populate the world of the Western Frontier where Avatar begins to feel a lot like an Ubisoft title. Expect to participate in a large amount of fetch quests, base takedowns, earning Clan approval and generally being the only character in the game capable of getting anything done. If you’ve played any recent Ubisoft game, what you’ll be doing in Avatar isn’t that surprising or interesting. To Massive Entertainment’s credit, the developer does pull away from one very Ubisoft trait, the UI. The UI and map are relatively clean for an Ubisoft game, often tasking you with using your Na’vi Sense to find the objective, track targets or find hidden objects in the environment. It was a refreshing change. If only that sense of change could have trickled down to the activities.
One area where Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora should have taken more notes from Far Cry is with its gameplay. As much as Avatar plays like Far Cry, it’s missing many of the sandbox elements that make that series so enjoyable. Avatar plays very much like a traditional FPS title, though being a Na’vi does lend you a height advantage. You’ll use a combination of Na’vi weapons (bows, spear throwers) and human weapons (assault rifles, shotguns) to get the job done. You can sneak around or go in guns-blazing, but more likely then not you’ll need to go in guns-blazing due to the terrible AI that’s capable of instantly spotting you no matter how quiet you are. When moving around fast and taking advantage of your height, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora can be fun.
The main problem is that it never gets much deeper than that. Enemy variety is shallow, constantly pitting you against the same few mechs and human foot soldiers. Likewise, the weaponry never evolves much past each bow or gun’s basic use, nor are there inventive ways to utilize them like you might in a Far Cry game. How you approach an RDA base at the beginning of the game will likely be how you approach one in the late game.
One aspect of gameplay that should have been left behind is the dreaded loot system. Like other modern single player, story-focused games from Ubisoft like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, loot-based mechanics feel arbitrarily shoved into Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Progression is tied to your loot level and loot is handled RNG style. It’s possible to glide through Avatar’s main story with the right drops, but the wrong ones will stall the story’s momentum as you scrounge around the world looking for loot. While this may increase playtime, it also damages the pacing of the narrative and is an overall terrible system that doesn’t need to be in this game.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has fleeting moments of fun, but it never evolves. The emergent gameplay that has made Far Cry such a staple never materializes thanks to basic weaponry, poor AI and a lack of enemy variety. While loot based mechanics have their place in other genres, it feels forced into Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, furthering weakening the narrative.
Massive Entertainment’s Snowdrop Engine has always delivered stunning looking visuals. Both The Division games on PS4, Xbox One and PC delivered beautifully-rendered worlds with great attention to detail, so it’s not surprising how amazing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora looks. The world of Pandora is brought to life in stunning detail from the dense foliage of Kinglor Forest to the windswept grass of the Upper Plains. The beautiful glow of the world truly comes to life at night, giving Pandora an even greater sense of beauty. It’s all brought to life through excellent lighting, beautiful effects work, and highly-detailed materials that all come together to create this living, breathing world. Those looking for a showcase for this current generation of hardware should look no further than Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Closing Comments:
There’s always been something mesmerizing about the world of Pandora. The artistic and technological vision of James Cameron has managed to capture people’s imagination, even if the plots of the films aren’t that deep. Pandora is the perfect location for a video game, giving players a chance to explore these beautiful landscapes. From that perspective, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a success, beautifully realizing and recreating the world in all its immersive glory. Like the films, the game is a technological achievement, but just like the films, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora lacks depth. The story has moments of brilliance when it focuses on a handful of characters and what motivates them, but that personal journey is mostly sidelined to follow an all-too familiar and derivative story. While the world of Pandora is beautifully realized, it’s also populated with derivative activities ripped straight out of a Far Cry game. Though the game is fun to play, the gameplay never evolves in any meaningful way outside of the terrible loot system, which actively harms the pacing. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a beautiful game to look at that occasionally delivers moments of excellence, but it lacks the depth underneath to deliver a mesmerizing and unforgettable experience worthy of its technological prowess.
Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora
Reviewed on PlayStation 5
