Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a love letter to fans of the saga starring those blue beings who, at first glance, have very human-like features, the Na’vi. Together with the release of Avatar 2: The Way of Water, the game has reignited many people’s interest. Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio and developer of titles such as Far Cry 3, the upcoming Star Wars Outlaws, and the Tom Clancy's The Division series, brings us this visually stunning and mechanically fun work that lets us live the dream of exploring Pandora, defending it from hostile human forces, or flying an Ikran between floating mountains.
Pandora as beautiful as ever
One of the aspects in which the game stands out the most is its visuals. The game manages to perfectly adapt the beauty of Pandora seen in the films into a video game. It’s important to highlight that films are pre-rendered while video games are rendered in real time, so achieving such a technically impressive result within the limitations of an interactive medium is quite a feat.
The different times of day and weather effects each have their own details that make the world feel alive—especially nighttime, filled with the bioluminescent nature iconic to the movies. The vast majority of environmental elements are interactive in one way or another, whether by shooting them with an arrow or in more subtle ways; if you get close slowly, the character performs a special animation.
However, we felt that despite the game’s visual beauty, the photo mode was not developed enough to achieve results faithful to what appears on screen, limiting the creative possibilities of capturing the game’s most beautiful moments.
Much more than a Far Cry
It’s evident that at first glance, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora can seem like a Far Cry game set in James Cameron’s universe, but once you try the game and its mechanics, you quickly realize it's much more than that. While it is a fairly conventional shooter-adventure game, it manages to make the gameplay experience feel like a progression of learning and improvement from the very beginning.
Combat and stealth feel strange at first since the tools you have don't allow you to do much, but as you progress and unlock upgrades, everything starts to feel incredibly fun, and you get the sense that nothing can stop you (even if you are taking a lot of damage—thanks to encounter design, you still feel powerful).
When it comes to planning a strategy for overcoming obstacles, the design is oriented toward all types of players—from those who want to blow everything up and don’t care about making noise, to those who want to clear outposts without being detected. This is made possible thanks to a completely optional hacking system that allows stealth-focused players to hack objectives without being spotted and, most importantly, without shooting or eliminating any enemies.
For exploration, Massive Entertainment offers an Exploration Mode, and although the studio itself does not recommend it—since the game experience was not designed for complete free-form play—this fully immersive mode changes the experience entirely. The only clues you get come in the form of instructions, as you will have no HUD indicators telling you where your objective is or where to find certain collectibles. While we also don’t recommend playing this way for your full experience, we believe it’s very interesting to at least try it, as every situation becomes an environmental puzzle where you must figure out where to go next.
As a final highlight, the game is a hybrid of first-person and third-person perspectives, and it’s a complete success, as the situations where the game switches between the two modes are very well designed. First-person lets you experience combat and exploration as a Na’vi, making the player feel fully immersed, while flying an Ikran is done in third-person, which helps the player feel the game world expand and increases the sensation of freedom.
An expanded Avatar universe
The story of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora expands what we already know about the saga’s universe. All the events in the game occur within the same timeline and world as the films, only in the western region of Pandora. Throughout the game, there are several nods to the movies, though the most obvious one is the brief mention of Jake Sully at the beginning.
Although the storyline is essentially the same as in the films, we get to dive deeply into the universe and learn about more clans, traditions, and creatures from a fully new perspective: a group of Na’vi children who were kidnapped when they were young by the RDA, and who, once they become aware of the organization’s evil plans, decide to try to drive them out of Pandora.
A truly fascinating experience
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora succeeds in uniting the best of shooter video games with the best of James Cameron’s universe, creating one of the most visually stunning and fun games of the new generation. Although the game is structured as a GaaS due to the number of microtransactions it contains, these are completely optional and do not provide any gameplay advantages—they are solely cosmetic.
We recommend the game not only to fans of the saga who want to explore more of the universe, but also to people who want to get into the series for the first time, as it serves as a very solid narrative starting point, in addition to offering a truly interesting gameplay experience.
