Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review

"Boring Beauty"

Campaign

January 17, 2024 at 9:15pm
By Jason Stettner

Like with the movie this is a case of spectacle over substance. It’s a lengthy experience, but unless you’re really into this world it’s a bit boring to play through. I’ve never been huge on the Avatar film franchise, but I thought in a gaming format it would connect with me more like the last effort from Ubisoft did and honestly this just didn’t hit the mark for me. It really is your typical sort of open world Ubisoft game, and not in the best of ways.

If you’re into learning about the culture and world of this fantasy universe it’s a cool theme park to visit but outside of that it’s not necessarily that riveting. It’s also tonally just very strange as well. You go from one point to another working with a quirky diverse crew hearing how awful humans are and how you need to save the day! Save the planet! It gets old really fast.

Anyways, from a story perspective you’re part of this young group of Na’vi. You’re in a Residential School which really mirrors issues that Canadian society of had in the past and it touches slightly upon those horrors throughout. I just felt this aspect wasn’t handled perfectly well or with enough elegance to really dive into those issues and connections wise that felt uncomfortable here.

Not in a way that felt effective for teaching, honestly very ineffective in that regard. From there you go out into the world meeting random characters, jumping across locations randomly and fighting the humans. It’s really weird as you get an awesome flying mount and then immediately lose it. Again, story wise it feels like it sort of hops along and was rather lackluster.

To match these issues were the forced elements of gathering gear randomly from points to become power enough, where the story isn’t the focus and it’s about grinding boring side activities out for which there are a lot. As I noted, if you like the core loop of play this can be fun but if it’s boring like it was for me the main story can be a lengthy drag.

Gameplay

This is a first person perspective action game featuring a massive open world. It’s probably the most impressive technical showcase of the current generation thus far as the environments are stunning. It’s gorgeous, it presents an alien world of Pandora beautifully and it’s a treat to move through.

All of the fauna reacts to you, there are creatures roaming about and the dynamic world feels every changing. You come across random Na’vi while exploring and there are many elements of crafting where you gather items from the world. It’s also filled with little bases to destroy, humans to kill and ways to save the planet to make it less toxic. It’s really a save the planet sort of thing that’s drilled into your head over tens of hours. It gets old.

It really is quite visually impressive although you will notice some performance issues while on Xbox Series X. You get two performance options. You get one where it’s 60fps targeted 1440p resolution with deep scaling. Then there’s also a 30fps mode with a full 4k target that is also deep resolution scaling. There’s HDR support, VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and Spatial sound support.

Past that we also have ray tracing for global illumination elements. It really does have the bells and whistles you want to see in current era and that’s impressive. As I mentioned you’ll be gathering resources so crafting and gear collection is big here. For whatever reason in a single player game that’s story focused you need to grind gear from bases to get tougher to take on challenges which helps make this insanely boring.

There was no reason for that and it can be a little brutal even when you scale difficulty stuff for combat. I did like the elements of destruction for human mechs but with that, you literally fight the same enemies over and over. It can also be hard to tell them from the environment since the color palette awkwardly mashes together.

There’s variation in the beauty of the world, but no variation in your combat. It’s the same slogging style for over ten hours and it drags badly. Not only in terms of story, but also what you’re doing. I did also have some bugs, scenarios where stealth didn’t work and points where enemies shot through walls or floors. There were also scenarios where the checkpoints were very poorly handled in this one.

The Conclusion

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is all spectacle being probably the most impressive current generation game when it comes to visuals, but alas a rather boring time lacking substance. I really didn’t appreciate the forced equipment system in here or the way the narrative was handled across the experience.

You have to really be into either saving the planet environmental wise or super into the world of the Na’vi as you learn so much about them that I just didn’t care for. This would have been really fascinating had we been learning about say a real aboriginal group, but a virtual one and pairing it with the Residential School elements really didn’t lend well in this one. Felt heavy handed.

I grew really tired of hearing how much humans suck, I am one and it got super old in this. I keep repeating that note, just like the game did every chance it had. It’s an impressive open world. It’s reactive world filled with things going on, at the same time it felt weirdly empty as you walked through it. It’s a strange feeling.

So I didn’t love playing this, I felt it was a bit rough to grind through and I had high hopes for it. It’s visually stunning outside of performance issues and if you like the core loop it’s a fine time. It just really didn’t push boundaries and it feels like the story could have been ever so much more emotional. It just doesn’t make sense at times and that whole quirky team beating the bad guys is so lame in this. Truly lame.

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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Ubisoft

Rating Overall: 5.8