Turning up nearly a year after James Cameron’s Avatar sequel, The Way of Water, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora doesn’t carry the same weight of expectation or even much in the way of hype. The good news is that it thinks it is bigger than your average cinematic tie-in and does its best to replicate the movies’ sense of scale. It understands then tries to spin its own yarn within their world.
Wisely, Frontiers of Pandora doesn’t follow the main plot or the characters of the films, instead following a new group of Na’vi freedom fighters, the remnants of a lost tribe, taken as children by the brutal RDA – the corrupt human administration at the heart of everything bad on the planet of Pandora. Having made your inevitable escape, it is up to you to roam the previously unseen western frontier, rediscovering your heritage and uniting the local Na’vi tribes to go to war.
Forget your bland and somewhat whiney hero. Here, as in the movies, Pandora is the real star. If you’ve ever wanted to race through its bioluminescent jungles and clamber up its gravity-defying mountains, Frontiers of Pandora is here to make your dreams come true. Ditto if you like the thought of becoming part of its otherworldly ecosystems, harvesting its resources to make food, clothing and weapons or fighting off its vicious predators. With a foot in both the human and Na’vi camps you are free to make use of guns and hacking gadgets but you’ll do more with the indigenous bows and arrows, crafting your own armour-piercing, poison-spreading ammunition, then putting it to good use on the thuggish RDA goons.
Sonic speeds
The joy of the game isn’t just in its sumptuous scenery, giving you Pandora in all its glowing alien glory, but in how you move around its spaces. Your long Na’vi limbs are built for sprinting, scrambling and jumping, while the world encourages you to keep surging forwards through natural springboards, vents and bouncy mushrooms. Double-jumps and vaulting moves just add to the momentum. When it’s not trying to be a first-person shooter, Frontiers of Pandora can feel like a first-person Sonic the Hedgehog. Simply getting from A to B across these improbable landscapes is a treat.
This isn’t a bad thing, because – as a free-roaming shooter – Frontiers of Pandora is a bit of a mixed bag. In small doses, the combat can be thrilling, as you tackle the RDA’s gung-ho marines and robotic Mech suits with sneaky grenade ambushes and silent arrows, using guerrilla tactics to beat tall odds. Even at the beginning, you can make the most of weak points to tackle the most impenetrable-looking foes. But every now and then you’ll find your hero’s journey blocked by a larger, heavily defended base, at which point the number of your foes and their improbably skills at spotting you slow the fast-flowing action into a grind.
A stealthy approach, where you hack the controls is possible, but pulling it off turns out to be tricky. One false move and the whole base will be on you in a matter of seconds, with reinforcements on the way. Tackling side missions and upgrading your skills and weapons becomes a must if you want to push through.
Far Cry in the Rainforest
What’s more, the more you play, the more it becomes obvious that Frontiers of Pandora lifts large chunks of its structure and its gameplay from Ubisoft’s Far Cry series. You have the same enemy facilities to clear, restoring the polluted jungle to health, and the same outposts to open and use as fast travel points. Between the luminous shrubs that restore ancestral skills and memories and the totem puzzles that dot the landscape, you have yet another massive map dotted with objectives and items to collect, and many of the side-quests feel like busywork.
Why waste time running errands or investigating someone’s crush when there are tribes that need to be recruited and a war to be won? Sure, there’s a need to build up trust with each tribe’s leaders, but there’s a lot of pointless box-ticking to be done at every stage. And while having a mini-game for harvesting fruit and crafting materials might sound like a good idea, it doesn’t half get wearing once you’re seven or eight hours in.
On the plus side, at least some of this stuff is optional, and when the game takes off it soars. You won’t forget the endless climb to find the nests of the dragon-like Ikran, as you speed from floating rock to floating rock high above the forest canopy. Nor will you forget the first time you take your new bestie for a ride, learning how to fly before you head into an epic confrontation. It’s the kind of game where you want to climb every mountain or ride one of the movies’ Direhorses across the undulating plains. Frontiers of Pandora is at its best when it goes for the sweeping sci-fi fantasy of the Avatar movies, even if that means imbibing a few gallons of pseudo-mystic mumbo jumbo on the way.
And in its way, this is how Frontiers of Pandora stays true to the spirit of Avatar, one minute dishing out gripping action and some of the most magnificent visuals that you’ve ever seen, the next hitting you with flat-footed plotting or a tiresome sequence that should have ended up on the cutting-room floor. It’s a game packed with enjoyable performances, but that struggles to maintain its own personality the whole way through. On balance, there’s enough great stuff here to please fans of free-roaming adventure and delight any Avatar fans, even if it’s a little more predictable and formulaic in stretches than we might have hoped for.
