Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora is an ambitious, but potentially alienating open world jaw-dropper

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Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora is an ambitious, but potentially alienating open world jaw-dropperOur thoughts after two hours with Ubisoft’s latest

Our thoughts after two hours with Ubisoft’s latest

Image credit:Ubisoft

Image credit:Ubisoft

Back in June, when our Ed got a 30-minute hands-off glimpse ofAvatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, he hadsuspicionsthat Ubisoft’s next big open world-athon was hiding some dark, terrible secret beneath the surface. It was almost too good, and too lovely-looking to be completely true, he proposed, and the brief tour of this rather enormous-looking game wasn’t quite long enough to really dig beneath the surface to see if Ubisoft’s lofty promises would hold up to closer scrutiny.

Pandora impresses right from the off, with a lush and dense forest floor and eye-catching structures in the distance. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

However, that green smudge will disappear altogether once you’re in the rough area you need to investigate, so you really do need to use your eyes to work out the exact location for where you’re meant to be headed - and in a world that’s so visually dense, colourful and alive with just… everything, this was a lot trickier than I was expecting. For example, previously uncovered locations don’t get added to your wider map screen after you’ve discovered them, making them harder to pinpoint like Assassin’s Creed’s obvious towns and caves. Really, the only thing your map gives you to work with are the wider region names of an area. Individual biomes within those regions are hidden away on a separate layer of the map menu, and if you want to ‘track’ a specific item or plant, you’ve got to dig into another menu tab before you can highlight it in a more obvious shade of yellow in your Na’vi senses.

Eventually, mate, hold your horses. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

As I said, I actually really enjoyed how different and unusual it felt in the playing of it, even if flicking between its various menu screens wasn’t quite as fluid as I’d perhaps like in this situation. Equally, I did also do a bit of a doubletake when I heard that this was actually the more guided ‘easy’ implementation of Avatar’s HUD screen, and that there was also an even more hands-off, green-smudge-less iteration of it compared to what I’d experienced in my preview session. Some people will probably love all this stuff. Others, however, may hate it, and we’ll have to wait until review code comes in before we can see how much of a mental drain it is in the full game.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

The climb up the ikran rookery was easily the highlight of my entire preview session. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Because the thing is, if you can get into the swing of how its navigation works, Frontiers Of Pandora is really quite something. Yes, there are the bones of aFar Cryhere in some of the objective types you end up encountering, but it also feels distinctly Avatar at the same time. Your skill tree, for example, is presented as a set of Na’vi memories you must rediscover as you try and part the fog of your RDA-induced amnesia, and when you harvest a bit of fruit from a plant, you have to literally hold down the mouse button to grip it before moving your mouse in a specific direction to pluck it from its pod. These angles of extraction vary depending on the plant, and for me, this additional layer of tactile problem solving was yet another welcome departure from the altogether more mindless resource gathering we so often see in Ubi open world games.

Similarly, some of the sequences I played could have been ripped straight out of the films, such as climbing up the ikran rookery to get your own flying companion pal, and raiding a large RDA facility to take out its disruptive radio towers and restore peace to the creatures of the region. These sequences are a lot more focused than gamboling about in the open world, and the ascent up the ikran rookery in particular felt commendably naturalistic as I tried to tame my big dragon bat.

Ah, yes, the all-important ritual of naming your new life partner/transport machine. I shall call you… Floof. (Other options included Temek, Hawk, Storm, Fury, Katir, and err… Carol. Damnit, should have gone with Carol…) |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Those lines did, admittedly, come crashing back into view whenever I whipped out my AK47 - the setup of the story is that your Na’vi’s a product of human indoctrination into the RDA before being liberated to return to your native roots. And there was also a particular hacking minigame I encountered enroute to the big RDA raid that was actually impossible to perform on a mouse and keyboard. In fact, my demo handler insisted I switch over to the PS5 controller for these sections, as the pressure-sensitive ring puzzles seemed so innately tuned to the DualSense 5’s adaptive trigger buttons that they straight up didn’t work when I attempted to do the same on my mouse. I have no idea how Ubisoft Massive are going to adapt/fix this for the PC version (or indeed Xbox controllers, since these weren’t available during my demo either), because it would be dumb in the extreme to have to have a game pad handy for these very specific sequences.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Flying around on your ikran felt pretty great, I have to admit. If I thought exploring Pandora on foot was impressive, then seeing it from the air is even more jaw-dropping. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Those irritations aside, though, the gunplay and subsequent bow and arrow skewering felt pleasing in the hands, with the latter proving particularly (perhaps almost stupidly) effective against the RDA’s giant mech soldiers. This is where you remember, ‘Ah, yes, this is secretly a big, dumb, fun video game underneath all the Avatar nonsense’, and it has all the same kinds of loot, power levels and gear crafting you’ve seen in other Ubi games. Then again, I’m not gonna lie: the power fantasy of taking down giant helicopters with just a couple of well-placed arrow blasts was enough to make the lizard part of my brain clap its hands in stupefied delight. It’s not terribly sophisticated at the end of the day, but hey, I know this to be true of most Ubisoft games these days and yet I still end up playing them for 100+ hours, so the joke’s (probably) on me, I guess.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

Honestly, who would ever attack mechs and RDA goons on foot when you can pelt them from your ikran instead? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Ubisoft

This is, of course, just a tiny slice of what is clearly a very large game. I still have a few concerns over how it’s all going to come together, but if Frontiers Of Pandora can sustain that swell of emotions I felt climbing up the ikran rookery across all of its big story beats, resisting the urge to descend into yet another Ubisoft collecathon fest, then there’s definitely a fun time to be had here, regardless of how into Avatar you are. As I say, I can’t say I have particularly strong feelings about the films or their wider themes, only that they felt quite game-like seeing them at the cinema, so if nothing else, a game of a film that also feels like a game is probably a weirdly good fit for it.

At times, Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora is almost what I imagine a more alien-themedDeath Strandingmight look like without all the Kojima nonsense piled on top of it, in the way it asks you to read and interact with the world around you. But then a moment later, its kaleidoscopic prism will shift to reveal a glint ofThe Division, before twisting yet again to settle into a kind of spiritual sequel toFar Cry Primal. Just, you know, with flying bat dragons and fluorescent horses instead of woolly mammoths and sabretooth tigers.

So no, I don’t think Frontiers Of Pandora is hiding anything truly dark and sinister in its lush, alien forests, unless you really can’t stand the idea of navigating its world using your own faculties for a change. It is still, for good and for ill, an Ubisoft game at the big blue heart of it all, albeit one that’s clearly trying to do something just a little bit different to the kind of popcorn-munching fare we normally get shoved down our throats. Am I suspicious of it still? Not really, though I do wonder how long it will take for my current cautious optimism to be dashed against its floating mountain ranges. I hope Avatar will be the exception to the usual Ubisoft rule when itcomes out on December 7th.