Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is ambitious, gorgeous, and occasionally clumsy

I’ve been looking forward to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora for some time now. The first Avatar movie made the idea of being able to explore Pandora yourself (as a Na’vi though, not as a boring human) pretty irresistible. But, like with the movies, an Avatar game is an ambitious idea. There’s a whole lot that could go right, but also plenty of areas where it could fall short. After getting the chance to play through some of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora at a hands-on preview, these are our thoughts on how the game holds up.You are not in Kansas anymoreAs with the movies, a major part of Avatar’s world is how eye-catching, vibrant, and colorful that world is, and you notice this straight away in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The colors are incredibly vivid and you can’t turn in any direction without seeing some interestingly bizarre plant or animal. You need a few moments when you first start the game up just to take in the striking visuals and the wave of unfamiliar sounds. I usually prefer daytime exploration as the best way to see and appreciate a game’s world, but everything really comes alive at night in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with luminous, glowing environments and almost neon-bright colors reaching away across the landscape. On a side note — remember these plants? The ones that zip away if you touch them? They’re in the game, and now I understand Jake’s temptation from the first movie — I got slightly distracted for a minute or two, running around and whacking them just to hear that thunk. Also, those whirly lizard things are back too. The Na’vi themselves are scattered around both in their bases and out in the wilderness between. They seem pretty silent until you’re almost on top of them; either that, or I was so overwhelmed at the start by just wandering around and trying to get to grips with this alien world that I didn’t realise I’d stumbled across a Na’vi group until one of them bellowed, “I HURT MY FOOT ON A ROCK TODAY” and almost gave me a little heart attack.However. It was, at least at first, difficult to appreciate all these gorgeous surroundings fully due to the sheer amount of stuff going on, both on-screen and in the surrounding world. Busy HUDs and alerts to status effects and dangers and so on aren’t exactly new, especially in Ubisoft games, but it was a bit of an onslaught in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. To be fair, the preview did start us off partway through the game, so it’s possible once we get the chance to play from the beginning ourselves, these alerts and on-screen info will make more sense and so intrude less on our experience. At any rate, it was a lot to begin with. Opening Pandora’s box of map iconsWithout that starting knowledge of what everything means, things were a bit overwhelming. While running past some ominously-vivid mushroom things, they spat a puff of toxic-looking air at me. Naturally, I sped off in a panic, and it wasn’t clear until later that they were actually boosting my speed and not poisoning me. Occasionally, an icon of fangs popped up on-screen. Other times, there was a little spiral. Sometimes it was some sort of colorful alert. What did all this mean? I couldn’t guess, since it was a little hard to parse everything else going on on-screen and survive in Pandora at the same time. This staggering amount of newness bled into the quests a little, too. Starting off partway through the game, I was tasked to locate some sort of organic resource to help with a ritual. Only, the resource, the ritual, and the name of the creature it was for were all, at first, unintelligible to me. Again, this is most likely the same type of temporary setback you run into with games like The Outer Worlds, where until you’re more familiar with the game’s futuristic/alien dialogue, things will just sound utterly incomprehensible. We’re also helped out here by the Hunter’s Guide, which is full of info on the world and its creatures. You can use your senses to highlight resources around you (sort of like Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s Eagle Vision), but with so many resources and other things of interest in the world, it’s useful to first check the Hunter’s Guide to find out what something looks like and what sort of area you might find it in.There’s a lot going on with the map as well. It looks like another vast world (which I am personally well up for when it comes to Avatar) and, again, I think it’ll take some time to get used to how this game has laid everything out. There are endless amounts of icons on the map — various discoverables and collectables — and it was initially a bit difficult to even distinguish between the player icon and the marker for my quest. That being said, I really enjoyed the exploration aspect. For your various quest objectives, you’re given rough directions rather than a pinpointed location; to find a particular landmark, for instance, and then go southeast of there, and look for a standout location such as a rock covered in willow trees. It feels like a much better way to actually take in your surroundings and think about your journey, rather than charging mindlessly from one marker to another. It also adds to the feeling that you’re discovering Pandora for yourself and learning about it along with your character.Take to the skiesThis brings me onto something I really wanted to talk about: traversal. Partway through my first few quests, I was already starting to wonder when I might get to unlock mounts for another (and quicker) way to move across Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s beautiful world. I didn’t come across any direhorses in my time with the game, but I did get to find and bond with an ikran (one of the Pterosaur-type creatures which feature so heavily in the first Avatar movie) and this was really a standout moment. As in the movie, you have to put in a fair bit of effort to convince an ikran to bond with you. Once you have, however, you all of a sudden have a huge and wonderful freedom to soar across this alien world. You can dive for greater speed and your ikran has its own skills to unlock, such as the ability to do barrel rolls or to scoop up fish when flying low over deep water. From the parts that I played, it looked like you had plenty of options for places to land, so you don’t have to deal with that whole “well I guess I have to park over here and then trek the rest of the way” fiasco. You can also fire weapons from atop your ikran. One quest objective was to destroy some aerial RDA facilities, and I chose to do so by hopping on my ikran, flying back for a bit of distance, and blowing it up from afar. You can also fling yourself off your ikran in mid-air and call it to catch you, which is just a whole lot of fun to play with. I do love cosmetic options, and it looks like you’ll also be able to give your ikran various pieces of gear and even change its pattern. Run! Definitely run!When it comes to movement without your ikran, I’m a little torn. Running around Pandora is a great way to appreciate the beautiful landscape, and your Na’vi is capable of greater agility and power than a human character, making it easier to get around the terrain. But there are aspects of moving around the game’s world that feel almost outdated. There are mechanisms such as Lift Vines to climb onto huge trees or cliffs, as well as Mermaid Tails — huge leaves that fling you across gaps — but these can feel a little clunky. Sure, it might be too much to expect such fluid movement across the board, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora does in general look incredible, yet shuffling to line up to use a specific vine or to be clumsily flung across a gulf almost feels like relics of older games.You’re not the only one with a gun, b****Combat, meanwhile, seemed enjoyably challenging. Our Na’vi character is in theory stronger than their human enemies, but we still need to get to grips with our various weapons before we can be much of a threat to the RDA, and more than one enemy at a time can still be way too much to take on. We’ve got Na’vi weapons like the longbow and heavy bow, and RDA weapons like the stun grenade and shotgun, and it was an interesting challenge to figure out which weapons were best suited to which occasion. Heavy bows were great for doing large amounts of damage in one shot, but were slower than my other, weaker bows, and I ran out of ammo quickly if I relied on these. The soldiers in mech suits are pretty tough if you can’t find their weak spots, and in the skies you’ve got gunships and other things to worry about. It took a little practice to get used to aiming while on an ikran, but watching a gunship falling to the ground and exploding on impact was pretty satisfying — as was taking out the soldiers shooting from the open side of an aircraft. Stealth is also an option, and I tried to go for this approach when taking on an enemy base, but I wasn’t yet a stealthy enough Na’vi to manage it and ended up in chaotic open conflict pretty quickly.Along with main and side quests, exploration, and combat, there’s also a whole lot more to do with crafting, cooking, and moving through the skill trees. It’s much more than you could get through in this hands-on preview, but the preview did accomplish the most important thing: I very much wanted to keep playing. While some things felt overwhelming at first, this seems like it will play into the story itself; we’re figuring out how not just to survive but to thrive in Pandora, alongside our character. I can’t wait to get to the point where I’m fluidly zipping through the lush foliage of the forests and plains before taking to the skies with my ikran with a confidence in my knowledge of the game’s world. It’s too early to tell if a huge open world full of various challenges and points of interest will lead to a familiar fatigue or if the colorful, vibrant twist of a Pandoran setting might prevent this. Either way, I am already very impatient for December.In the meantime — while we wait for those Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora achievements, don’t forget to check out our round-up of everything we know about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora!



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