Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review | Delightful as a Na’vi, mundane as a human

A wonderful interactive experience for fans of the franchise to experience the sights and sounds of Pandora(Image: Ubisoft)

Disclaimer: Before you read the headline and assume that the game allows you to play as a human, allow me to swiftly disabuse you of the notion. The game lets you play as one playable character, a Na’vi (and not an Avatar as in the films). What the headline refers to, however, will become clearer in the following paragraphs.

Now, on with the show.

And the Massive Entertainment-developed and Ubisoft-published Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — released worldwide on December 7 — is, if nothing else, a fantastic show. The open-world title based on James Cameron’s film franchise is verily a show of what Pandora looks like, what the Snowdrop game engine can do, and what high-quality free running or parkour from a first-person perspective feels like.

(Image: Ubisoft)

Location, location, location

There are a handful of games that do a better job of virtual tourism than the actual ‘gaming experience’ and of late, a bunch of Ubisoft titles have found themselves in this category. To name but a few, Riders Republic married a breathtaking world of national parks with rather forgettable gameplay, Far Cry 6 placed super familiar (to the point of cliché) gameplay tropes in one of the most gorgeous surroundings in a game, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla that dropped very bad open-world habits on a stunning version of 9th century Europe.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora faces a similar predicament, with its juxtaposition of an awe-inspiring world with extremely dated gameplay characteristics. I’ll get into the latter shortly, but for now, let’s stay on the masterpiece of a setting that is Pandora. Laid out across three regions — Clouded Forest, Kinglor Forest and Upper Plains — that are in turn spread across various biomes, the playable area of the Na’vi planet is nothing if not a digital playground.

I’ve been playing the game for the past week or so, and the first thing I noticed upon breaking out of my confinement in the game’s tutorial stage was that Pandora’s forests are lush, varied and a delight to explore. At first, it’s quite a sensory overload — the explosion of colours, all the weird and wonderful flora and fauna, and of course, the variety of terrains to be scaled and so on. From the spiral Mimosa pudica-esque (touch-me-not) flowers that wrap up as soon as you come close and the climbable vines scattered across the map, to the spherical plants that give off a puff of energy-laden dust when you run through them and the mushroom-like bounce pads that propel you skyward, there’s a lot to take in.

Over time, you’ll get a sense of which plants are best avoided and which ones you need to actively seek out. You’ll also gain an awareness of the various beasts — ranging from the Direhorse and Ikran (Pandora’s famous flying Mountain Banshees) that serve as mounts to the resource-laden Sturmbeest and the lethal Thanator — who inhabit this world, their respective inclinations towards attacking you, and their ‘uses’.

In short, I could lavish as much time extolling the virtues of the world as the developers have spent crafting it, and still fall short. But I would be remiss not to point out that it’s the player character’s parkour/free-running abilities, massive leap and considerable height that truly unlocks this world.

Seen from six-odd feet off the ground with human limits of strength and mobility, it would be a pretty enough world. But it’s with a 10-foot-tall Na’vi frame that you can really appreciate the pleasures of sprinting across a massive, hollowed-out tree trunk, vaulting over tree tops and off large plants, leaping from one hand-hold to another up a rock face, and being flung across chasms by a giant leaf known as a mermaid’s tail.

Fundamental to the traversal experience is the absence of signposted footholds or hand-holds on surfaces. The game leaves you to figure out your own way up a hill, around a particularly treacherous ravine and more. And the outcome is rewarding, no matter the frustration (as I personally experienced) that the same lack of signposting induces along the way. In fact, it was during my first phase of traversal trial-and-error (entailing nearly a dozen instances of falling down a waterfall) that I noticed the game’s intensely atmospheric sound design.

While the water effects look passable, it is the evolving roar and rumble of a waterfall as you make your way down its different stages (top, middle and bottom) that emphasise just how much care and attention seem to have gone into the sound design. Then there is the minimalistic HUD (Heads-Up Display) that lets you savour all the visual delights and the musical score — thematically contiguous with the film score — to tie everything up neatly in a wonderful multisensory package.

And this sense of wonder is established long before you’ve even forged a bond with an Ikran and taken to the skies on her/his back. If you’ve flown on a Sunwing in Horizon: Forbidden West, you’ll have a decent idea of what to expect with an Ikran. The mount is agile, highly manoeuvrable, zippy across the sky and is the only way to reach the Hallelujah Mountains (Pandora’s floating islands). As you level up, your Ikran becomes quite useful in sticky aerial combat situations. All in all, a very useful beast to have on your side… or your underside, to be more precise.

(Image: Ubisoft)

Same old song and dance

Just as we’re zooming past the tree-tops and watching the realistic way leaves are knocked loose before floating to the forest floor, we’re brought crashing down in a messy heap. The reason for this accident: Almost everything that isn’t what was described above. The game is set a few years after the events of the first film and a little before those depicted in Avatar: The Way of Water. You play a Na’vi from a seemingly extinct tribe raised in captivity — to be an ambassador and liaison with other Na’vi — by the evil Resources Development Administration (RDA). After a brief setup, you escape and embark on a series of meetings with assorted Na’vi tribes (for whom you have to do all sorts of tasks in order to win their favour), take down a whole host of RDA installations and troops, and partake of a variety of side quests ranging from the mildly interesting to the decidedly monotonous.

An instance of the latter is the ‘memory painting’ minigame that sees you tracking down locations and making these paintings in a manner that is quite reminiscent of the spell-casting in Hogwarts Legacy. The first couple of times that you use the thumbsticks to trace the patterns displayed on screen are entertaining enough, but this gradually begins to become quite a drag. And this phenomenon extends across most of the game’s side content.

On the main quest side of things unfortunately, the game stutters and stumbles through a largely forgettable story. I realise now that my experience may have been coloured by my enjoyment of the 2009 film, so I should probably furnish a full disclosure at this stage. I have yet to watch Avatar: The Way of Water, but while I did watch the original film, I found myself intrigued by very little outside of the audiovisual splendour of Pandora and the incredible 3D effects. The story was a stale ‘white saviour’ drama in the vein of a Dances With Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans, albeit set on a different planet.

Fortunately, in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you don’t play as Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully or some other human in Na’vi avatar. Instead, you play as a genuine Na’vi, which does lend an air of credibility and ownness to the struggle for freedom. Unfortunately, that’s also where a great deal of sameness creeps in. If you’ve played Ubisoft’s last first-person open-world title (Far Cry 6), then all the themes of resistance, rebellion and guerrilla tactics (disrupting supply lines, neutralising enemy installations and such) begin to seem awfully familiar. You’re just doing it on a different planet,... and there’s no Giancarlo Esposito simultaneously chomping away on a cigar and chewing up the scenery.

The main story isn’t particularly unpredictable and goes down the formulaic path of leaving things open-ended enough to be able to cram in some more content. Whether this will be in the form of the expansion DLC packs expected over the course of the next few months or a full-fledged sequel remains to be seen, but I’m not holding my breath.

When it comes to gameplay loops, the combat — arguably one of the centrepieces of the game — is nothing that hasn’t been seen before. It does feel a lot like the action in Ubisoft’s Far Cry franchise. The number of weapon types is on the leaner side, but varied enough to keep you interested, although how the gigantic Na’vi can use human-sized guns still befuddles me. Stealth is a gigantic misstep for the game, because as you’d imagine it’s quite tricky to hide a 10-foot-tall, blue creature. And I can’t help but wonder if the game would’ve been a lot better paced and more enthralling without the need for my character to slink past puny humans. On the plus side, my experience with co-op on Xbox Series X was quite smooth with minimal hiccups. However, I would’ve appreciated the ability to communicate via voice (instead of bizarre emotes) with my co-op companion.

So, where does that leave us? Middling main story, humdrum side content, and average action, but at least the non-player characters must be interesting, right? Sadly, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora falls in this regard too, because most areas are sparsely populated, and most of the NPCs that do exist are largely around to send you on missions or dump a wheelbarrow full of exposition and lore on you. All of this is exacerbated by some of the most generic writing I’ve come across in a game in quite some time.

A dozen-plus hours in, I’d begun to ask myself a very basic question: Would I even play this game if it wasn’t for the Avatar licensing?

(Image: Ubisoft)

Of Na’vi and Men

This seems as good a time as any to revisit and elaborate on the headline of this piece. As you’ll have no doubt noted from the paragraphs preceding this one, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is great fun when you’re exploring Pandora and being a Na’vi. It is far less fun when you’re essaying the role of a human being playing a videogame. After all, ticking off objectives, scanning through a map pock-marked with points of interest and going through the motions of repetitive drudgery masquerading as open-world gameplay loops is not really a preserve of the Na’vi.

But it’s not as though there aren’t some good ideas here. Plucking fruit off tree just the right way to get maximum bang for one’s buck is an entertaining and rewarding cooking minigame (a simplified version of cooking in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom), and some of the exploration side quests are the few beams of sunshine able to penetrate the thick clouds of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s dated approach to open-worlds.

With game engines making world design more accessible and arguably easier than it was in the past, there’s been a rash of open-world games over the past few years. However, only a few of them successfully entertain, move the format forward or both. Unfortunately, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora does neither. It is, at best, a wonderful interactive experience for fans of the franchise to experience the sights and sounds of Pandora. And at worst, it’s an effort to drum up and sustain interest in the franchise, at least until the next film is released.

In closing, this title is highly recommended if you are a fan of the films. There are plenty of nods to the cinematic depiction of Avatar and you’ll probably get a kick out of most of them. If you’re not a fan, maybe play Far Cry 6 until Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora sees a significant price drop and give it a go when the DLC packs are announced.

Game reviewed on Xbox Series X. Review code provided by publisher