Avatar 2: The Way Of Water made over a billion dollars at the global box office, but I've yet to encounter a single human being that isn’t a colleague who bothered to go see it.
It’s a good movie! Breaking new ground in the realm of visual effects while building upon the world James Cameron created in countless ways. It’s still pretty dry and predictable when it comes to storytelling and characters, but for the average joe it is more than enough for a film that provides rock solid entertainment value without inspiring much else. This brings us to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a new open world game from Ubisoft and Massive that aims to faithfully expand upon the filmic world with new characters, mechanics, and ideas. After a couple of hours with the game though, it sure seems like a souped-up version of Far Cry.
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I recently popped down to Ubisoft’s offices just outside of London and was thrown into the multicoloured forests and floating cliffs of Pandora to do whatever I liked. There were some missions to follow as part of the preview build, but otherwise I spent two hours killing fascist military dudes, saving local inhabitants, and flying my Ikran - who I called Floof - high into the sky in search of new discoveries. There is a sense of wonder not dissimilar to the films, like you are discovering the world for the first time as a fledgling Na’vi who must also earn stripes within a tribe that has every reason not to trust them. On the surface this setting is ideal for an open-world game offering untold freedom and exp🔯erimentation, but Frontiers of Pandora relies too much on past victories to ever escape their uninspiring shadow.
The first thing I noticed when jumping into the game was how much of its control scheme and gameplay mechanics feel transplanted from Ubisoft’s long-running open-world series. I can pull back a bow similarly, or sprint forward to clamber up platforms in ways that feel almost identical. You can’t shake the similarities, so much so that it wouldn’t be a stretch to label Frontiers of Pandora as a licensed side project, one that takes an exis꧑ting universe and applies the Far Cry model to it.
Which isn’t a bad idea, and Avatar’s range of exploration and combat fits snugly into the blueprint, especially when you are on the side of one faction vying for territory against another. You’ll take over outposts by completing some pedestrian objectives, or save wildlife from patrolling grunts while exploring the world. There are also resources to gather, locals to help with everyday problems, and discoveries around which are designed much like modern 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed games. Although, most of these were already taken care of inꦡ the portion of the world I was allowed to explore, so it was hard to get an accurate idea of what moment-to-moment gameplay would be like aside from scripted missions. It wasn’t ideal, but Pandora remains a gorgeously massive place.
Gear is sorted by rarity, and the majority of things can be crafted at tables or your inventory. Bases are scattered around the open world as s🌊ources of quests and bastions of safety. My heart was hoping for an exciting new standout feature that would spring forth and impress me, or showcase what Avatar aims to do differently aside from throwing us onto an alien planet with a flying alien horse and loads of sick bows and arrows instead of Montana or Yara. There’s a chance it could, and there’s more than enough verticality in its environments to craft distinct combat encounters and quests, but will it do that? Or will it stick to the safer confines of almost every other open-world game?
When trying to track down an objective, instead of a map marker you are given a handful of generic descriptors that are meant to encourage natural exploration of the world, but in most cases I would simply follow the quest icon and walk around awkwardly until I stumbled upon what I was searching for. Pandora is a fairly homogenous mixture of bright colours and alien fauna, meaningಞ it was difficult to pinpoint proper landmarks or feel like I was making a mark on a place I would come to fondly memorise. It felt like an extra hurdle, and one that doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from its contemporaries. Sprinting can feel weirdly slow too, making on-foot traversal of Pandora a bit of an afterthought once you have access to a flying mount who can be summoned from literally anywhere. When I could fast travel or soar into the sky, walking around on my lanky blue legs didn’t feel worth the trouble without knowing exactly what side missions would await me on the ground.
Combat is also very easy, or it at least it was in the preview build. Human mechs that I recall taking out dozens of Na’vi in the films can be downed with three arrows or fewer than a full magazine of bullets in Frontiers of Pandora, turning outposts into a cakewalk. You are also very tall, so human enemies can be brushed aside with a light punch unless they’re hiding in the mountains or atop tall platforms aiming snipers at you. Even as a new species in a video game that could easily expand on the types of technology and weapons they have access to, Massive hasn’t done much here to take advantage of that. I can use some sort of cool launcher thaꦍt can fling poisonous or explosive projectiles, but when it’s more of a chore to use than existing weapons, there wasn’t much of a point. Much of it feels uninspired.
Flying feels incredible, though, and goes a long way in conveying the sheer vastness of this world. Your Ikran isn’t limited to the clouds, but can soar far above them until it flirts with the precipice of💫 space, all before flying back down in a process that not only takes minutes, but teases parts of the map I wasn’t allowed to explore yet, and couldn’t wait to uncover. It’s hard to ignore what Frontiers of Pandora is going for in its design philosophy, and how much of it fails to offer up anything new. But if it manages to flesh out the world of Avatar and its many ideas just enough, those shortcomings could be forgiven. There is a unique appeal to being dropped in a licensed game that goes beyond being a tie-in, and wants to push the universe further with its own spin on things, although it’s hard to tell how compelling its ideas can really be when the gameplay it relies on is made up of things we’ve seen so many times before, and also done better elsewhere.
Your mileage with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandꦡora will vary depending on two things: your love for Far Cry, and your love for Avatar. If you’re the only person on this planet who loves both of these things more than anything, then I have some amazing news. Otherwise, this feels like a visually stunning open-world game without the mechanical or narrative depth required to help it stand out in a year of masterpieces. I want to see more from the full game, but only for the benefit of my doubt that it offers something beyond these lukewarm initial impressions.
