Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora arrives tomorrow, and while we’ve had the chance to play the game a little early, our review is far from ready. Enjoy some quick thoughts instead!
Ubisoft’s dive into James Cameron’s expansive story of Avatar has long been on my list of anticipated games. As such, I was thrilled when they offered me the chance to check out the game early for review purposes. That said, codes for the console version of the game (pretty sure my PC would literally explode if I tried Frontiers of Pandora on it) didn’t hit until just yesterday.
As you can imagine, with a large open-world game with a vast new story, getting just a few hours of gameplay in last night wasn’t nearly enough for me to formulate an opinion for a definitive “review.” That said, I’ve got some quick and dirty first impressions that might interest you.
So Many Options – Right off the bat, Frontiers of Pandora presents you with a ridiculous amount of settings you can adjust for accessibility. It’s been awesome to see more AAA games embrace this side of things, but even if you don’t need to utilize those specific settings, the game still lets you change things to your heart’s content. From UI/HUD options, to even fully remapping the control schemes, you can play how you want. None of it is presented in a pushy way either, and it’s just as easy to go with the defaults and start playing quicker.
Immersive Setting – Frontiers of Pandora does an excellent job of making you feel like you’ve been dropped into James Cameron’s films. The vibrant environment is teeming with life and feels alive in fun ways even as you just walk around normally.
It’s a lot like when Jake Sully first ventured out on the planet’s surface (including the plants you can touch and they retract), but you get to experience first hand. It doesn’t hurt that the graphics are pretty damn impressive and allows for tons of tiny details to pop out in any given area.
Familiar Gameplay With Some Fun Twists – A common refrain you’ll likely uncover if you read other reviews out there, is that Frontiers of Pandora largely plays like Far Cry. For the most part, that seems accurate so far with some very familiar mechanics.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and there are some fun changes they toss in there to make it more unique to the setting/world. For example, you’ll have to gather some resources from the environment to craft items and make food. Some of these resources have to be gathered delicately so you don’t disturb/destroy things unnecessarily. The result is a little mini-game, but it’s one of the fun ways the game keeps with the film’s overall themes of revering the planet.
Story Beats – I haven’t been able to get far enough into the story to give any firm impressions of how it’s going (good, bad, or otherwise). I do want to briefly mention my thoughts on the general setup of events as it pertains to Indigenous trauma.
As we’ve seen from the trailers and such, the story puts you in the shoes of a young Na’vi who had been taken from his family at a young age and raised within the RDA as potential “ambassadors.” It’s a ploy to give the humans some sort of advantage with the “savages” while trying to civilize them.
Much like the films, it’s meant as an analogy to the colonization efforts that displaced Native Americans. I know there’s much discussion to be had about using our trauma to tell stories, and how our cultures in media shouldn’t be boiled down to merely the hardships we’ve endured. For the most part I agree with the sentiment and we need more of our stories being made in general.
But that doesn’t mean these other stories don’t have value. At the end of the day, being able to take on the role of an indigenous character fighting back against the colonizers while reconnecting to my cultural roots is pretty fucking cool. It’s not something we get to see often, and serves as a way to live out a fantasy for many of us within the Native diaspora.
Overall, I’m very much digging Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora in the short amount of time I’ve spent with it so far. It has a lot of potential to be more than just “Far Cry with blue paint” and even as I type these words up at work, I find myself eager to get back into the game.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is set to launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PCs on December 7, 2023.
Be on the look out for my full review later on!
