Inside the first hour of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you’re taking down a base in an effort to clear among the map.
Uncommonly does a recreation set its stall out fairly so rapidly. It’s nearly overwhelming simply how a lot Avatar’s opening hours really feel like a blue-skinned Far Cry sequel, and whereas it does do some issues to barely refresh the formulation, from a gameplay perspective, the sport hardly ever will get extra thrilling than that.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora opens with the participant forged as a Navi baby who was kidnapped by the RDA (the human colonizers) and compelled right into a re-education program. Throughout a failed breakout, your character suffers a tragedy that can encourage them to flee into the surface world, reconnect with their heritage, and rid Pandora of the RDA.
Avatar is a big-budget open-world recreation from a earlier period. It’s a relatively good a kind of, and we will’t assist get the sensation that if this recreation had dropped 5 years in the past, it might have come throughout as far stronger, however open-world fatigue, particularly Ubisoft open-world fatigue, nonetheless hasn’t worn off.
You’re going around the globe gathering crafting supplies that may enhance your gear by negligible quantities. You’re spending time in menus debating the deserves of tiny stat buffs, just for the gadgets to be rapidly made irrelevant by mission rewards.
The sport provides two modes for the primary marketing campaign, every of which determines how a lot handholding the missions will give you. One mode suggests common clues about the place it’s best to go subsequent, or will inform you the title of a spot relatively than a particular quest marker, and it’s as much as you to work out the place it’s best to go.
It is a significantly better approach to play the sport and provides a way of exploration that’s largely eradicated once you as an alternative select to have the glowing orb guiding you to your subsequent mission.
The bow fight in Avatar is plenty of enjoyable, and it’s nonetheless pleasurable to stealth by way of RDA camps selecting off enemies one after the other. It turns into a bit farcical once you keep in mind that your character is round 9 toes tall, nevertheless it’s nonetheless higher than the choice: open hearth.
For plot causes, your character is skilled with firearms, that means once you get into the surface world, you may choose up an assault rifle and open hearth on the RDA. This presents an imbalance that the sport by no means addresses.
In a stealth recreation, should you get to the purpose the place you need to pull out the gun and open hearth, you’ve most likely misplaced. Positive, you may not truly die, nevertheless it’s not the way you’re purported to play the sport.
In Frontiers of Pandora, the weapons are so highly effective there’s no have to sneak round in any way. Mix that with an extremely highly effective stun grenade you’re given on the recreation’s outset, and also you’re much less wandering naive Navi and extra John Ramblue.
That is all in help of a narrative that’s deeply inconsistent. There’s an enormous quantity of phrases and place names thrown at you abruptly, which turns into considerably overwhelming. The sport has a built-in fish-out-of-water machine it might use to clarify issues at a little bit of a slower tempo, however Frontiers of Pandora will get slowed down into the weeds of lore extraordinarily rapidly.
“It’s a genuinely gorgeous recreation, and simply one of many best-looking open-world video games we’ve ever performed.”
It’s a typical insurrection story, together with some unusually dated references to real-life political unrest, nevertheless it’s removed from a memorable story, making it one of the vital true-to-IP parts of the sport.
Whereas the story didn’t do something for us, the actual star of the present is Pandora itself. Pandora is an unbelievable open-world native to discover, and a breath of contemporary air from the practical wildernesses of the final decade of open worlds.
Very like the movies, Frontiers of Pandora will get to have enjoyable ripping the legal guidelines of physics to bits, going completely wild with the bioluminescent paints, and making the world pop. It’s a genuinely gorgeous recreation, and simply one of many best-looking open-world video games we’ve ever performed.
It’s a technical showpiece that may stand alongside, and at instances, forward of video games like Horizon Forbidden West, Pink Lifeless Redemption 2 and different latest open-world runners.
The music in Avatar Frontiers of Pandora can also be a spotlight, with well-timed musical cues routinely injecting a way of splendor and epic scale to what you’re doing. The primary time you’re taking off in your flying mount throughout the skies of Pandora may be very transferring. It’s a recreation that has its presentation completely nailed down, however this does come on the worth of efficiency.
Even on top-of-the-line PC {hardware}, we encountered constant slowdown when transitioning out and in of cutscenes, usually leaving characters frozen in place whereas dialogue performed. At different instances the sport can be operating flawlessly on the highest settings, then all of a sudden shudder to a halt and crash right down to single-digit frames per second.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is an efficient recreation that has one large blue foot in two completely different generations. Whereas presentationally, it’s chic, from a gameplay perspective, it hardly ever provides something new, and nonetheless depends on much-mocked map-clearing litter.