Avatar Frontiers of Pandora review - A beautiful game of patience and naivety

When I first saw the Avatar movie back in 2009, it felt like a mixed experience. While the visuals were truly amazing and out of this world, the story felt predictable and kind of one-dimensional. Interestingly, my initial time with Avatar Frontiers of Pandora walked the same path of mixed experience.

By now, everyone has associated Frontiers of Pandora with Ubisoft’s other popular open-world first-person survival shooter series, Far Cry, and while there are some similarities, there are also distinct differences between the two. However, keeping all that aside, let’s take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora.

The premise of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - Living up to a legacy

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

When the first Avatar movie came out back in 2009, I wasn’t mature enough to understand the anti-colonial and environmental undertones. However, the second movie Way of the Water released last year, and it was a rollercoaster experience for me.

From the highs of the breathtaking visuals presented on the massive IMAX screens to the emotional lows of whaling scenes, in my opinion, Way of the Water not only lived up to its predecessor, but surpassed it in more than one way. As such, I was quite excited about Avatar Frontiers of Pandora coming from Massive Entertainment.

While I never really got into the Division franchise, I tried out the titles and appreciated the world-building of the built-in Snowdrop Engine. That world-building, paired with the survival, open-world experiences, rich with multi-dimensional characters of the Far Cry series Ubisoft is known for, and set in the world of Avatar, is what I expected from the title.

Little did I know, that I was in for another rollercoaster experience. Where after nearly 30 hours in the game, I’m still uncertain where I stand with it.

The initial impression of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - Massively beautiful

After launching the game for the first time, the first thing that jumped out to me was how detailed the character models were. They seem to have jumped right out of the screen. However, for all its detailed character models, the Na’vi seemed to blend in together and looked quite familiar to one another.

As for the human characters, the main antagonist, John Mercer, seemed a comically one-dimensional antagonist. This is surprising considering that this game is seemingly inspired by the Far Cry series, known for its iconic antagonists like Vaas, Pagan Min, Joseph Seed, and Anton Castillo.

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

After an extended prologue involving an escape from the RDA’s base, I was thrown into the world of Pandora, and the first thing that came to my mind was that it is dense. I was familiar with a lot of forest depictions in video games, but in my experience, nobody has been able to capture the daunting beauty of a forest like Avatar Frontiers of Pandora.

The world of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - Beautifully bland

The game is, of course, set in the Na’vi home world of Pandora. A densely packed natural paradise, ravaged by the RDA to mine resources. While the first movie portrayed it adequately, I was blown away by Way of The Water’s portrayal of Pandora, including the vast oceans.

If I compare the Frontiers of Pandora’s depiction, it would be somewhere in the middle of the two. Certainly a more involved and detailed world, yet not really a mind-blowing experience.

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

As mentioned earlier, I was pretty excited by the density and the scale of the world, from the massive skyscraper tall trees to the interconnected web of branches. However, it became tiresome very quickly, especially when I had to travel long distances for single objectives. As for the different biomes, they do look different up close and are significant in hunting and gathering, but at a distance, they blended into one another and the novelty wore off.

Interestingly one aspect I really liked about the world of Pandora is the polluted areas, taken over by the RDA bases. The dark and gloomy atmosphere drastically contrasted with the bright and colorful forests, which sort of instinctively fuels you to take down the RDA bases and return the area to nature.

The story of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - Enjoyable yet predictable

Moving onto the story, right off the bat, it is quite predictable in nature. The player character is a Na’vi of the Serentu tribe, who was kidnapped and raised by RDA alongside other children from the tribe, to be ambassadors.

At one moment during the prologue, the protagonist’s sister is killed for disobeying a simple rule, right in front of them. And yet, it does not really garner any kind of genuine reaction from any of the Na’vi. They continue to attend classes and carry on as if nothing really happened.

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

After being rescued by the resistance and escaping from the destroyed base, and a couple of quests learning some of the basic mechanics of the game, the player sets off to meet a tribe and convince the chief to join the resistance. Once done, the game devolves into a repeating loop of going to a tribe, learning their ways, discovering what it means to be Na’vi, facing some major atrocity by RDA, and ultimately convincing the tribe to join the resistance.

While in broad strokes it isn’t anything new, and is good enough to be a serviceable vehicle for the gameplay and world-building, what makes it painful are the human and the Na’vi characters. They are, at best, two-dimensional antagonists without any proper character development, and at worst, dangerously naive.

The characters of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - The danger of naivety

Characters have never really been a strong point of the Avatar franchise, and unfortunately, that tradition continues to be part of Frontiers of Pandora.

Despite being inspired by the Far Cry franchise, the game misses the most iconic aspect, the complicated and deep relationship between a fish-out-of-the-water protagonist and a larger-than-life antagonist who blurs the line between what’s right and wrong.

With the player character learning what it means to be a Na’vi, the game does capture the fish-out-of-the-water feeling for the protagonist, but fails to set up the antagonist and anything more than just a “bad guy.”

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

Moreover, the protagonist comes off as naive throughout the story, which completely negates any opportunity for proper character growth. They focus on the fact of the RDA being evil for destroying Pandora's nature, but completely ignore the personal motivation that the prologue tries to set up with their sister’s death. Ultimately, it focuses on that would have not only opportunity for proper character growth, but would have blurred the line between justice and revenge.

As for the primary antagonist, John Mercer, a leader of the RDA and the administrator of The Ambassador Program, was a bit of a letdown. Considering he is the administrator of the TAP, logically he should have more interest in reaching out to the Na’vi children, and manipulating them to view him as a protective figure, not shoot one of them right in front of the other, completely disrespecting their culture.

Although he tries to manipulate one of the primary characters, it comes too little too late to make him anything more than a two-dimensional bad guy for the sake of being a bad guy.

One of the most interesting aspects for me while watching Way of the Water was the different tribes of the world. While Frontiers of Pandora has three distinct tribes, they sort of blend in together and don’t really stand apart, even though they have a distinct style. To be fair to the developers, all three are forest tribes and the Na’vi don’t have many prominent clothing items to make them stand apart.

The weapons of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - Missed the aim

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora offers players two different types of weapons. There's a more primitive selection including longbows, spears, and staffsling, and traditional ballistic firearms including assault rifles, and RPGs for the RDA arsenal.

From a story perspective, I expected my character, who was abducted as a child and trained at the RDA facility, to be experienced with RDA weapons while fumbling with Na’vi weapons. Surprisingly, it was completely the opposite.

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

Not only do the RDA guns miss the punch of the Na’vi bows, but frustratingly there is no aim down sight (ADS). This is a surprising and drastic step back for a first-person shooter in 2023. If I pressed the right trigger, it instead zoomed in a bit, taking me back to the early PS1 dungeon-shooter days. Furthermore, the guns felt quite indistinguishable gameplay-wise from one another.

All in all, while it's fun to play more with the Na’vi weapons than the RDA offerings, I wished the game didn’t heavyhandedly push me towards one category, unrealistically nerfing the other side.

The conclusion of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora - Conflicting sides

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Image via Ubisoft)

At the start of the review, I was stuck in a rut, regarding where I stood with the game. Similar to my experience with the original movie, Frontiers of Pandora was a mixed experience for me. I was certainly impressed by the world-building and the visual language. The polluted areas visually inspired me to take the fight to the RDA.

Yet the gameplay felt extremely dated with a barely serviceable story, wrapped up with one-dimensional naive characters. The bizarre choice of not having ADS on RDA weapons felt frustratingly backward, while the size and density of the forest became tiring within the first couple of times I had to travel back and forth for objectives.

At the end of the day, while Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is a visually impressive game worthy of being part of James Camron’s world, it simply fails to be fun. I would much rather go back to Far Cry 6 to get my fix of an open-world first-person shooter RPG or rewatch Way of the Water for my Avatar fix. With Frontiers of Pandora in the rearview mirror, I’m now a bit concerned about Star Wars Outlaws.