Avatar Frontiers of Pandora Review

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora Review - Gameffine

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora peaks in terms of the visual quality, performance, and world building. It however does not do so well in terms of the story it offers.

Price: 3,499

Price Currency: INR

Operating System: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC

Application Category: Game

Editor's Rating:
8

Our Avatar Frontiers of Pandora Review took its good time to come out for only one reason. We got lost in the beauty of Pandora and forgot we had to cover the game for our wonderful readers. From fighting RDA as if we hated their guts to becoming and living like a Na’vi, the game always surprised us. Apart from how it looks, a Farcry is hiding underneath the surface. Released on December 7 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S and PC, this Ubisoft title pushes the graphical definition of the gaming industry one step up.

Let’s jump into Pandora.

Wake up Na’vi, you have the RDA to Burn.

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is separate from the movie narrative but based on the same universe. As children, you, Na’vi of the Sarentu clan, are a part of the RDA ambassador program, stripped of where you belong and learning the ways of the humans. But an incident occurs, and you’re forced to fall asleep for years.

Almost a decade and a half later, you wake up being rescued by the Na’vi and rogue humans who have ditched the RDA. Not realising what happened and for how long you have been asleep, you and your siblings find yourself in a confusing situation. All you know for now is that you are being hunted for your life and have to escape the RDA facility at all costs.

Dodging bullets and cramping through the small structures intended for human use, you finally make your way out. What you hold yourself to is Pandora. A magical land with flora and fauna you’ve never seen before. An ecosystem that claims everything that your eyes can see. As a Na’vi, you are stripped from your actual home, and you walk into the forest to once again be a part of the Pandora, living the life of a true Na’vi, being the leader of the clans who bring everyone together.

The only hurt to this magical land is RDA. And they will do everything in their hands to repeat the fate of Earth. The lakes turn oily, the trees die, the animals are on the brink of death, and the RDA leaves behind every cruelty possible to desecrate the lands. This is where you have to fight back. You have to bring the clans together and fight the way of the Na’vi. Pandora is yours to protect.

A World You’d Love to Get Lost into

From the first second of the game booting up, it had already started working magic to capture the players’ attention. Like a Disney Movie, the game introduced its studios in a great chase camera action with soft music that sparks hope and merges the ambience of Pandora. I could not wait to see Pandora up-front if the intro was so good.

The story immediately narrates your childhood and how you were brought up at the RDA facility. But after your rescue from the RDA facility, you see a bright light blinding you from afar. Upon getting closer, you see a way out. For the first time in your life, you step into the Pandora. From the chirping of the flying creatures to the flowing rivers of Pandora, you’ve never experienced an ambience like this before. Deer-like creatures brush past you as if you’re a part of the forest, only for you to realise the forest speaks to you in its way. The world of Pandora will consume you from the first step itself.

While the game will test the mightiest of the gaming rigs ever built, the support on mid-range and an excellent optimisation opportunity are always significant steps in the right direction. From a studio with a shaky launch like the Watch Dogs Legion in terms of performance, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is leaps and bounds ahead regarding quality and how the game runs overall.

Pandora is a world full of opportunity and scale unlike no other. The game’s map design and overall look are familiar to those who have spent time in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, but the graphics take a giant leap in terms of the technology offered. Making a game that is truly an alien world and making it work together has been done exceptionally well in Avatar Frontiers of Pandora.

Having your own Ikran in the game enables vertical exploration, as many giant floating rocks are across the map. Ikran is only one of the two available traversal creatures that will help travel all across the Pandora. Since you and Ikran share a special bond, he will travel to all the places you go and won’t be afraid to catch you out of the sky in one call.

Just Did That? Now, could you do it AGAIN?

Avatar’s Frontiers of Pandora is a very balanced game. And yes, we don’t mean it in a good way. For every step forward the game has taken in terms of having a world incredibly constructed to allow you to explore and absorb with groundbreaking graphics, it is unfortunately doomed by the quest system of Ghost Recon Breakpoint and mechanics of Farcry that fans have already played across 6 Main Titles.

As for the quests, you follow a Farcry-like operation system. The RDA undertakes camps, this time in the form of factories and massive machinery, killing the environment around them. Going Loud in these camps is not an option since the Mechs are more accessible to take down than Humans, who can laser you from a mile afar as if I’m playing Fortnite.

The main storyline quests also follow a Ghost Recon Breakpoint-like format, where instead of knowing what’s the next objective, it is marked on the map and not on the screen, along with hints on the top left of the screen, only to figure out the next place for you to be in to continue the story. This is where Breakpoint was heavily criticised, but it made sense as it’s a tactical game with intel gathering being an integral part. Why it still lives on in Avatar is beyond my understanding.

You start with a standard bow and eventually unlock the Hardshot bow. Both these bow work the way the name suggests, but you’ll also unlock Assault rifles. There’s the only way to obtain ammunition for AR’s from enemy mech and storage. The damage, however, is shallow and does not work well against anyone but human soldiers. But simultaneously, you cannot even ADS with AR, rendering it the most useless gun in the game. You, however, will receive a shotgun, which is hugely buffed and will make all your encounters vanish in a snap of a finger. You also have a staff sling to set up traps, and you will also unlock a short bow for rapid-fire arrows and make quick work of the enemies.

While I agree that the Farcry mechanics work well with the world-building frontiers Pandora is set in, it is also challenging for me to understand that the Na’vi have nothing better than humans except strength, Na’vi vision and height. While the game offers you six sets of skill trees, they only help you make the game easier instead of allowing a more in-depth mechanics expansion. There’s a skill tree for your Ikran that has non-essential upgrades except a few. You also get a unique skill tree called the Ancestor’s Memories, allowing you to gain the powers your ancestors once had. And these ancestors’ memories are unlocked by visiting unique flowers spread over the map. While this sounds amazing, games like Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom also practice a similar skill-opening method, and the game provides you with mechanic-based usable items. On the other hand, in Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, one of the powers of the Ancestors Skill tree is to fast-travel without using energy. Go Ancestors!

The story does not pick up and captures your attention only once you’re 60% through the game. The cutscenes look worse at times than the gameplay. There are an infinite number of plotholes and predictable storylines. Even for the main missions, many quest parts lead to an end irrelevant to the game’s final task and act mainly as a filler. The character building needs to be improved and can only be approached if you do the side missions. While only a few side missions are interesting, most tasks are nothing but a fetch-and-grab quest.

Overall, the game fails to offer more narrative and storyline, which needs to be more encouraging to keep the gamers hooked for the upcoming story expansions 2024. We hope they will deliver a similar experience to the Immortals Fenix Rising DLCs.

Verdict

Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is simply a visual miracle of video games. The massive world of Pandora will have you addicted to exploring every depth of it. However, the quest system and narrative don’t do justice to the game. Filled with non-essential side quests and repetitive missions, Pandora will forever be etched in memory, but I doubt I feel the same for the story.