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Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora review: these frontiers will bore yaGIVE ME A JEEP
GIVE ME A JEEP
Image credit:Ubisoft
Image credit:Ubisoft
After my time spent withopen worldactionadventureAvatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, all I wanted was a jeep, maybe a jet to get around quicker. The jungles and the plains might be wonderful to look at, but they’re too vast, filled with boring tasks, and overly reliant on level-gating to force a sense of progress. Sure, there’s some spectacle in narrow escapes from the nasty humans - and their factories that make the plants droopy - but throughout the rebellion I ditched my bow for a shotgun with extended mags and a muzzle brake. For a game that’s all, “the humans are bad”, I was ready to defect. At least I would’ve been able to keep my shotgun.
Mercer’s army has set up smoke-spewing camps and factories that not only enforce his colonisation efforts, but also corrupt the forest around them. Na’vi clans dotted around Pandora are suffering, so your job is to find them, earn their trust, and unite them all against the man in the crisp white shirt. You’ll attack these camps with bows and spear-throwers for ‘stealthier’ approaches or guns if you’d rather pepper Mercer’s soldiers and mechs with bullets.
Complete quests or jack into plants with your hair and you receive skill points. These can be spent in skill trees that up your cooking, fighting, and the like. Track down special pink plants and they grant Ancestor Skills, which are abilities like being able to break big falls. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
When it’s not all turned to brown mulch from Mercer’s operations, Pandora is a genuine stunner and is home to, perhaps, one of the most beautiful jungles I’ve ever explored in a game. The way light diffuses through canopies, the way bright fronds retreat back into the earth as you approach, and the sheer density of the flora gives you such a wonderful sense of place. Outside of the jungle Pandora is an enormous space, hosting different, similarly dazzling biomes like vast plains and shaded woodland. But my generosity only extends so far, as their spectacle soon gives way to fatigue.
Your first big sigh will stem from the simple act of figuring out where to go. Play on Guided mode and you’ll be granted the pleasure of quest markers on a map that doesn’t let you zoom in very far, making it a gigantic pain to find an individual in, say, a crowded base. Even if you’re out in the jungle, you’ll find yourself frequently activating your Na’vi scan-o-vision to keep track of the glowy blue outlines of your objective… before it disappears and you have to reactivate it again. It’s honestly baffling to me how anyone could play on Exploration mode, which removes markers and has you rely on environmental clues instead.
My PC didn’t hit the recommended specs and I had to turn practically every setting to low, very low, or off. Granted, the game still managed to look very nice and was totally playable, but a stable 60fps simply wasn’t possible with my rig. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft
As you destroy these bases and make the plants happy, you’ll soon realise it all comes back to the RDA. Then you’ll realise it’s because that’s as far as Avatar’s storycango. It’s not capable of anything more than, “The sky people, back at again with their fossil fuels”, which makes almost every story beat so predictable you’ll mouth “RDA” in time with the angry Na’vi in cutscenes.
Honestly, I’m glad I don’t have to play any more Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. It lures you in with a stunning map and some lovely parkour around the trees, maybe a touch of shooting, a touch of looting. But as things progress, the Ubisoft algorithm kicks in and the excitement plateaus. Everything you do is predictable and everything you find, another tally mark. Give me a jeep and let me call in an airstrike, then maybe I’d change my mind.
