Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review: A gorgeous but generic experience

It was 14 years ago that Ubisoft first let gamers enter James Cameron's sci-fi universe with Avatar: The Game. Movie tie-in games like that have all but died out since then, but all these years, and another movie, later Ubisoft is taking another crack at it with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Round two isn't a tie-in like last time either, with Division veteran studio Massive Entertainment taking the reins of the project as lead developer for a full-fledged, AAA, open-world adventure that's canon to the movie universe but follows its own storyline.

From the moment I saw the game in action during Ubisoft's initial gameplay reveal, I was convinced that it was going to be an Avatar flavored Far Cry game, and I was also quite ok with that. Pandora's guerilla warfare-style action felt appropriate for the kind of experience that Far Cry offers. Massive says it has collaborated heavily with James Cameron's production company Lightstorm Entertainment as well as Disney to make sure that the experience is both authentic to the ongoing big screen journey while also being independent enough to show off its world building skills.

Now that I've put a couple of dozen hours into the game, it's clear that the experience has taken inspiration from multiple open-world entries for its gameplay systems, but the Far Cry comparison is the most apt. If you've played a game from the Ubisoft action series, you'll be right at home in Massive's take on Pandora. Unfortunately, it's something I started wishing wasn't the case as my hour count increased.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora PC version is what got the chance to experience for this piece. I've kept story details to a minimum in this review to make it free from spoilers as much as possible. The attached screenshots are also mostly of environments and wildlife. Here are my thoughts on Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment's newest open world adventure Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

A new but familiar side of Pandora

I'm willing to bet that a majority of people jumping into this game are interested in simply entering the alien world of Pandora and exploring its vistas. This is where this game excels at. The spectacle that is the Avatar universe is always on full display, from lush jungles covered by mist to giant windswept plains and the floating mountains, I'd say Massive delivers enough eye candy to probably fill out three games, not one. Being a first-person game, you're up close and personal with everything it has to offer.

The starting region is essentially the first movie but in video game form. The absolutely massive Kinglor Forest feels like it goes on forever, with only rivers, waterfalls, and roots of ancient trees managing to cut through the landscape. Another neat element is being used to the size of the Na'vi and their habitats, then going near human-made structures and realizing just how small everything is. Crouching through "regular-sized" doors, seeing tiny furniture, and looking down on humans like they are children is humorous.

The iconic alien flora and fauna from the big screen have been translated to our more interactive medium with impressive detail too. Running through fields of spiral "weeds" have them ducking out of sight, helicopter-like bugs (or seeds?) hover lazily beneath thick canopies, lit up, neon-like vines grow out of the earth inside caves. At the same time, getting chased by giant alien wildlife the size of dinosaurs through the forests as you hear the everything being trampled behind you feels appropriately scary.

The game makes it a spectacle when you finally get to move on and experience a brand-new area, and the second region, the Upper Plains, quickly became my favorite. The much more open-ended grassy plains with scattered treacherous cliffs and its unique "bent" landscape that has formed due to eons of high winds are a sight to look at. I should mention that each region has its own flavors of biomes, plants, wildlife, as well as resources to gather.

As expected, once you unlock your flying Ikran mount, the exploration possibilities become endless. The tops of massive waterfalls, floating mountains, or airborne RDA platforms that felt impossible to each are suddenly just a quick jaunt on your Ikran away. Something I really appreciate is the game having no issues with me using the mount to skip platforming puzzles in the open world to get upgrades and collectables. If I'm in no mood to run and jump through a maze of caves and mountains, I can simply swoop to the item directly, grab it, and swoop back out without any issues.

There is technically another type of "biome" that appears in all regions: Polluted areas that humans have built RDA facilities in. You can spot these from quite a distance away thanks to the huge amount of smoke they emit. The environments surrounding these locations are essentially poisoned and dying until our Na'vi protagonist does something about that.

There is a day-night cycle too, meaning every piece of gorgeous scenery has plenty of more to offer in other lighting conditions, especially during the night when the nearby gas giant and other its moons become much more prominent in the sky. Thankfully, the quickly accessible photomode has a slider to change the time of day if you're curious.

Story and missions

While we are on the same moon where the movies take place in, the focus is on the Western Frontier, an entirely new continent where the battle between the native clans of Na'vi and the Resources Development Administration (RDA) human forces continue. We play the role of one orphaned Na'vi kidnapped, raised, and trained by humans to be soldiers/ambassadors, but due to the events of the first movie, plans fall through, and we return to the jungles of Pandora to join the resistance, kicking off the adventure.

Three Na'vi clans occupy this side of the moon, each with their own unique customs, skills, and methods of living with nature. For being a part of an almost extinct, but highly respected, clan of Na'vi named Sarentu, we are given the important job of gaining favor and uniting the trio against the RDA and cleansing the continent. As you can expect, not everyone is very keen on an all-out war against the "Sky People". Convincing the heads of clans that it is possible to beat the humans, their machines, and polluting factories, is what you will be doing in the main quests, while side stories involve helping with minor community squabbles and research involving Na'vi and allied humans.

The main storyline is a simple one, and you can see the twists coming from a Pandoran mile away. Still, with compelling characters, it would have sufficed to deliver a strong narrative. Unfortunately, the missions mostly involve talking to NPCs before running off to do the given errand, with a short cutscene at the beginning and end. I had trouble connecting with any of the Na'vi clan members or human allies.

Despite there being a resistance force that we are somehow expanding rapidly, there is no concept of working alongside an ally during a mission or receiving help while exploring the open world. This has been an issue with Far Cry games as well, but at least they have evolved to include dynamic interactions like calling in help from a companion in later entries. Radio conversations and small scripted sequences are the sole interactions you have with NPCs in Frontiers of Pandora. For being a living breathing world, it can certainly feel quite lonely here.

Having access to such a massive open world with a focus on exploration also backfires in this situation. I sometimes spent hours in between missions hunting animals for materials, gathering skill points from far away points, and simply wandering around (totally not because I got lost) before jumping back into a main mission. By that time, I had forgotten where I left things off. Even the main villains from the RDA, John Mercer and Angela Harding, barely get any screen time after the introductory cutscene. I had to remind myself "oh yeah, they are the big baddies" whenever they have a line or two over the radio in missions much later.

Gameplay

If you've played a Far Cry game before, that's basically the gameplay loop in Frontiers of Pandora, just in the body of a giant blue alien. You'll be hunting wildlife for upgrade materials, upgrading skill trees, cooking food, finding collectibles, and calling your flying mount like a taxi whenever it's needed. Thanks to the human training our protagonist has received, we also have access to some heavy human weaponry like machine guns and RPGs, but I found myself ignoring most of these in favor of the Na'vi's more primitive but powerful armaments.

Just like in the movies, the primary opponents the Na'vi face in the game are humans, which come in a few flavors: regular soldiers with guns, the mech suits, as well as flying machines that serve as air support with machine guns or reinforcement troop deployers. Taking down puny humans with bows, that basically fire small trees as arrows, is satisfying. However, while different variants of these troops show up as the story progresses to offer more of a threat, fighting waves of soldiers and mechs become stale quite quickly. The variants mostly arrive with more plates of armor on their weak points, simply making them bullet sponges (or arrow sponges) instead of offering anything creative.

Ubisoft games are well known for their "clear this area and take back the land" objectives. Unfortunately, the outpost missions here don't feel very fleshed out. You must either kill everyone and then flip highlighted switches or sneak around and flip the switches. Something like turning Pandora's nature against the human forces, converting wild animals to fight for you, or calling in allies from the tribes you've allied with, all of which actually transpire in the movies, would have made these sections much more exciting and varied. Instead, fighting becomes a game of hide and seek while continuously crafting arrows to spam into the same RDA units that become increasingly bullet spongy.

Frontiers of Pandora does not feature an XP system, and killing RDA provides no rewards for players. Considering the Na’vi position in this war, it’s a good way to emphasize that this is a freedom fighter story. The game always pushes you to craft or buy the latest gear and earn more skill points by presenting a Combat Strength system, which compares your health and damage output against upcoming quests’ enemy power. This is basically instructing you not to speed run the game and have a bad time.

Skill upgrades do add a few interesting things into the mix, like being able to pull out pilots from stunned mechs for an instakill and air takedowns for your flying mount. But in the five trees of unlocks available, there are simply too many that offer percentage-based stat upgrades or stuff like extra inventory space for ammo and resources.

Now we come to the minigames, a way too common feature for a game touting so many speedy traveling systems and freedom. The pacing issues this causes was definitely a frustration. Every time you pick up a resource, you’ll be doing a mini-game. Need to unlock an outpost as a fast travel point? Mini-game. Want to take down a mech without alerting enemies? Why not a maze clearing mini-game while enemies still roam around. Thankfully, several accessibility settings in the options allow you automate these interactions. But they still take time to finish, just without the complexity.

Perhaps my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, but I also found difficulties with following objectives and finding quest givers, even with the “Guided” mode enabled. Having Guided mode points out objectives with a hovering light whenever you use your “avatar vision” technique, and without it, you must use the quest’s written descriptions (like south of a certain river next to a specific tent) to find your way through the massive regions. It’s very easy to get disoriented on where you need to go due to the density of the jungles, even NPCs and traversal points blend into the greenery quite easily. I was spending more time deciphering the map than traveling there.

If you think having Guided mode enabled would be the solution, there is a slight issue. While you do receive a marker to follow, it disappears when the objective is in the vicinity, and if it’s a base with multiple floors containing a wealth of NPCs, it takes much longer than it should to simply accept or finish a quest.

Performance

To put it simply, you need a powerful rig to run this game well. My Lenovo Legion 5 Pro housing an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM (running on an NVMe) is barely able to hold an average of 60FPS in 1200p (1920x1200, 16:10 display). I have embedded results of the built-in benchmark runs below, which were performed with each graphics preset while having all upscaling options disabled.

While there aren’t any explicit ray tracing settings to enable or disable, turning up specific graphics options does kick these intensive options into high gear, at least according to the tooltips, as I couldn’t tell the difference in most cases. The good news is that the game manages to look good even on low graphics, and a lot of the performance issues are in the starting region.

Like with most games nowadays, upscaling tech from all three major graphics vendors are available to help with reaching stable frame rates. This includes AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS). AMD’s solution is the most advanced option available, with even the latest FSR 3 frame generation tech being available. Unfortunately, using this in sub-60FPS situations made the game feel both smooth and jumpy to play, with artifacts also appearing whenever one of the many screen distortion effects would show up in-game.

DLSS and XeSS both presented a picture with a much blurrier and shimmering presentation compared to FSR 3, which I would describe as being not great to look at. The extensive use of particle effects in Pandora meant artifacts were a common occurrence whenever it rained, fog rolled in, while swimming, or any kind of shimmering showed up. However, it seems that this is the original version of DLSS and not DLSS 2 or 3 with their huge optimizations and the latest frame generation tech. For most of the game, I stuck to using a mix of low-medium settings with FSR 2 set to Balanced, averaging around 60FPS.

I also ran into texture streaming issues. Skins and clothes of characters, assets, and ground textures would get stuck in a muddy state without displaying any detail for extended periods of time, even during cutscenes. You might catch the effect in action in some of the screenshots I’ve embedded too. I expect this is why even the minimum for the game requires 8GB of VRAM.

Conclusion

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a mixed bag. The dense jungles are a joy to explore a feast for the eyes, with Massive managing to capture the feeling of exploring an alien world effectively. The freedom while flying, exploration elements of diving into caves and climbing floating mountains, as well as the movie-authentic flora and fauna all combine for an optimal experience for a fan of the franchise or someone who simply loves exploration.

At the same time, the predictable storyline, the tiny amount of enemy variety, stale missions, and momentum breaking mini-games make the rest of the experience a boring one.

The uninteresting supporting characters and forgettable villains also make the main storyline a chore instead of something to look forward to. Things I expected to see in an Avatar open world game like using nature and wildlife against the invading humans, or calling in allied Na’vi for battles, or even having companions are simply not there. Instead, it’s filled with quests that have you clearing outposts by flipping levers, fighting waves of repetitive enemies, and plenty of “go here and scan that” or “collect this much of this” missions. With so many open-world games under its belt, it’s bizarre for me to see a Ubisoft-published come out that feels like it has forgotten all the lessons from the last decade. There is a in-game cash shop to buy cosmetic items though.

Saying 2023 has been an awesome year for gaming is an understatement. Month after month we've been getting blockbusters from all sides. While Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora probably won't be on be on my mind when I look back at this year's greatest games, this is easily the best option for fans of the Avatar universe to experience the alien world and its vistas first-hand, even with its sour points.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launches on December 7 across Ubisoft Connect, Epic Games Store, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 for $69.99. It will also be available on Ubisoft+ subscription service on day one across PC and Xbox. This review was conducted on a pre-release PC copy of the game provided by the publisher.