Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review — A Hard Game To Recommend

Massive’s AAA Avatar game is a stunner, but it’s not quite enough.

I know it can be tiresome reading review introduction paragraphs like this, but I really, really enjoy the Avatar films. The original 2009 movie was the first film where I truly understood how good CGI could actually be, where it’s not just a tool but a creative medium. 2022’s ‘The Way of Water’ might be one of my favourite movie sequels of all time at this point, and yet again a technical milestone for the industry.

So, the one thing I’ve been wanting for years? A genuinely great Avatar video game. It’s a property that has received little attention in the video game industry, with only a 2009 non-canon tie in (also made by Ubisoft) landing in player’s hands in the 15 years since the first film. It… wasn’t good, to be frank, and had little impact on the third-person action genre.

Well in 2023, Massive — another Ubisoft studio — decided to give it another crack, with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. It launched right at the death of 2023, to the point where it was arguably the last ‘big’ release of the year, and after the main review period was over I’ve seen basically no-one talking about it. Except for me. Because I take too long to write these reviews.

Oops.

Anyway, for those who don’t know, Frontiers of Pandora is a canon Avatar story set in and around both Avatar movies. The start of the game has you, some kidnapped and mildly-brainwashed Na’Vi, attempting to escape a human facility in conjunction with Jake Sully ruining their day in the 2009 film. After being emergency placed in cryo, they are awoken 15 years later (conveniently just before when ‘The Way of Water’ is set) to help fight the RDA.

After that, you’re let loose into the open world of Pandora. Which is where you realise; it’s Massive’s take on a Far Cry style game, mixed with the world, lore, and themes of the Avatar universe. This isn’t that surprising if we’re being honest, with the first person perspective, slightly larger than life villain, and icon-covered mini-map quickly betraying the game’s intentions within minutes of leaving the tutorial area.

It’s all here. You’re crafting food items for health and buffs, crafting weapons and ‘gear’ (sigh) for combat, unlocking skills as you level up (sigh), and tackling RDA bases in order to help cure the environment of Pandora. It’s pretty standard fare for any open world game these days, especially one coming out of Ubisoft’s camp. You know the deal, and you’ll likely know by now whether you enjoy that formula or not.

Me? Going against the grain somewhat, I actually like the Far Cry experience. There’s a power trip there that makes for a fun, engaging gameplay loop. The sandbox nature of those games is somewhat diluted by the binary choice of ‘to stealth or not to stealth’ — where the only other choice is open warfare — but the array of weaponry, attachments, vehicles, always enables a fairly energetic experience.

Oddly, I’m able to say that most of this simply doesn’t exist in Frontiers of Pandora. Or, rather, it hasn’t yet after 8–10 hours of play time. We’ll get onto how Pandora has been represented on a visual/ audio level in a moment, but to get to the crux of the issue; this setting does not work in this format. At least not a degree that leads me to recommending this to anyone but the most dedicated Avatar fans.

The breadth of weapons, and weapon customisation seen in the Far Cry games? That doesn’t exist here, because you’re restricted to a few Na’Vi weapons, and a handful of RDA weapons. Far as I can tell, there’s no adding silencers or other muzzles, no adding sights or stocks, none of that signature freedom regarding your combat approach that you see in Ubisoft’s other major FPS.

Stealth does exist here, but it’s nowhere near as rewarding or well designed as you’d expect in a game like this. Instead of carefully planning out approaches to your attacks, using enemy vision cones to efficiently remove enemies from the field with flashy takedowns and John Wick style headshots, you just… hope to not get seen? It’s odd — there’s definitely an enemy alert state, but it’s incredibly sensitive. More often than not I’d get seen from miles away, through layers of foliage and trees, by someone I didn’t even know existed, thus alerting the entire area to my location immediately.

These enemies aren’t a joke either — I’ve died more times in the first 10ish hours than I do in many games in total. It only takes a handful of bullets to take you down to critical health, and health items rely on you having done your fair share of foraging or cooking before combat. In some games I turn down the difficulty because I want to be able to experience the story without worrying. In Frontiers of Pandora, I had to turn it down because I couldn’t. Stop. Dying.

This coming from the guy who’s got 300 hours in Elden Ring, has finished Sekiro five or six times, and generally relishes a decent challenge. Part of the issue is that Massive have included both player and enemy levels, something which I’ve gotta admit is a bit of a personal gripe of mine with modern games. While stumbling into drastically higher-levelled enemies is (thankfully) rarer here than in some of the Assassin’s Creed games, it’s still incredibly annoying to organically encounter a base or interesting POI and get swiftly flattened because their number is bigger than yours.

I guess I could say that I just don’t enjoy combat or map-clearing in Frontiers of Pandora at all, which is a crying shame. Because Massive have done an otherwise brilliant job recreating the world of Avatar.

I honestly can’t stress enough how stunning this game is. It’s kind of apt really, that the first major AAA Avatar game looks this good, damn near all of the time. Especially when you consider how important the movies’ visuals were. I’d go so far as to say that it’s probably the most impressive game visually to come out in 2023, whatever you may think of it’s staunch focus on photo-realism over art direction.

It has that ‘leaving the vault’ moment of the Fallout games, but you’re met with a world that channels the addictive beauty of James Cameron’s universe brilliantly. Your vision is constantly filled with foliage all across the colour spectrum, native creatures hunting or simply existing, or the hazy fog that settles over swampland. The skybox is littered with floating rocks, completely explorable to the player with the use of your very own Ikran, nestled between gloriously rendered clouds and mountain peaks.

At ground level, Massive’s excellent traversal takes the foreground, with the mantle, sprinting, and climbing systems all perfectly placed and balanced with Avatar’s lush undergrowth. There’s a few areas I wished for a wall run or something similar — mostly to reach areas that weren’t accompanied by vines or scalable ledges — but these moments were rare. It’s cliché, but you really do feel like a Na’Vi when you’re climbing through the forests of Pandora, utilising the latent strength and agility of your species.

All the while, you’re accompanied by light filtering through the tree canopy, water flowing down from waterfalls and into pools, streams, and lakes, with a density that (scaled up a decade or two) reminds me of how impressive early Far Cry and Crysis games were. Interiors also look great, and object density and variety is stellar. I rarely ever noticed obviously recycled elements, or arrays of elements (the same pattern of plants for example) when exploring interior or exterior environments.

Frontiers of Pandora doesn’t have quite the same attention to detail as something like God of War Ragnarok, Horizon Forbidden West, or Alan Wake 2. Where those games place as much importance on direction as they do visuals, along with industry-topping motion capture and facial work, Avatar relies purely on building a version of Pandora that feels authentic to the films. It’s a gorgeous world at pretty much every moment, even more so when you explore like you would real life, with patience, instead of burning through it at extreme pace to see the credits.

It’s a world where I was often avoiding combat because I wanted to simply walk around and soak in the atmosphere that Massive have mastered here. There are very few AAA games without combat, and obviously Avatar’s legacy is somewhat rooted in the idea of hostile contact and colonialism, so I’m not suggesting that combat should be removed or replaced. But a version of this combat system that better harnessed the beautiful environments, and the fauna and flora in it, would have been appreciated much more than what we got. Not to mention, it would’ve done justice to the incredible world design and aesthetics.

I suppose the same can be said of the story. The main story itself is pretty simple — you dislike the RDA, and you are assisting rebel humans and the local Na’Vi in eradicating both their presence, and their effect on the natural world of Pandora. I can’t give you much more than that because honestly? The game hasn’t given me much more than that yet. There’s a stereotypically evil head honcho (who is responsible for killing your sister and for kidnapping you and your friends) but he’s been surprisingly peripheral so far.

In fact most of the story honestly seems to be about trying to uniting the various Na’Vi spread around, while also assisting your home base in establishing a presence. Blowing up RDA drones, shutting down power plants, investigating corrupted wildlife, that sort of stuff. It’s not bad at all, and quite a few of the side quests are actually pretty engaging. Are they typical fetch quests hidden underneath the camouflage of interesting NPCs and a lovely world? Sure, but they’re generally more imaginative than most open world action games in this day and age.

I’ve just yet to feel any of that edge or hook that Ubisoft studios are generally good at weaving into their narratives. The main story here is so peripheral, that at times I have to remind myself that there is something important to do other than picking berries and climbing trees. Expecting the looming presence of Pagan Min or Anton Castillo and their armies to be hunting you down? You’ll be sorely disappointed in the early hours, as combat encounters with the RDA and their leader are at the bare minimum.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a weirdly mixed bag. If you enjoy revelling in the audio visual splendour of modern AAA gaming, then Massive’s attempt is right up there. A world crafted from the ground up that does a genuinely brilliant job of emulating the world Avatar introduced back in 2009, and all of the good that comes with that. A game ‘feel’ that reminds you of your Na’Vi origins, with a palpable sense of power and ability. I cannot applaud EA and Massive enough for that.

But the combat is surprisingly, almost shockingly shallow, with systems that barely feel fleshed out beyond the surface level controls. A complete absence of satisfying stealth, or fun weaponry, not to mention a startling approach to game difficulty, are further dragged down by needless character levels and gear score. I haven’t even mentioned the abhorrent store setup, full of cosmetics and gear packs that shouldn’t be anywhere near a full-priced £70 game.

The story and characters range from passable to good, which is something worth commending, but never feels as engaging as those from even other Ubisoft games, let alone modern open world titles from elsewhere in the industry. In the end, I’m not sure I’m going to finish Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Not because it’s bad, because it’s absolutely not. At its absolute worst, it’s a technical milestone for the industry. But sadly, even when at its best, it never manages to move beyond the aspiration of being just ‘a good Avatar game’ — something which, by itself, exists as a pretty low bar.