I've only had a few hours to put into Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but one thing is evident. This game needed a bit longer in the oven. December is a notoriously bad time to launch a new game. Besides Super Smash Brothers or other Nintendo Switch games, I can't think of many games that can battle against the zeitgeist that games like Fortnite, Warzone, and whichever games do well at the Game Awards command from the gaming audience around this time. The new Warzone from Call of Duty just launched, Fortnite introduced a huge update with Fortnite Legos and more. And later tonight, we will be covering the Game Awards live.
These are just a few of the big gaming events going on while Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora quietly launches in the background. The launch date isn't the game's only issue though, which I noticed after only a few hours of gameplay.
Is Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora worth playing?
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of James Cameron's Avatar franchise. I enjoyed the first movie mainly for its innovative use of 3D in a way movies hadn't really done before. That fad has mostly left movies by this point, so when the new movie was released earlier this year, I don't think I even saw an option for 3D at any of my local theaters. I went and saw the movie a bit begrudgingly but ended up enjoying it for the action and directing.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is following a similar trend in that I don't have a ton of interest in the game but playing it is providing a better experience than I expected. Want to get an overall feel of the game? Check out the trailer below.
I'm not a huge Ubisoft open-world fan. I like the old Assassin's Creed games and even Black Flag, but I never got into Far Cry or the newer massive open-world Assassin's Creed games like Valhalla. That being said, it is hard to shake the feeling that Avatar is a little bit closer to Horizon Zero Dawn than it is Far Cry at least in the first few hours of the game, and I did enjoy Horizon Zero Dawn.
With all of that being said, I am enjoying the game, unfortunately, the game feels somewhat unfinished and could have benefited from a rounding out of the quest system, combat, and storytelling. I played the game on my PC with a 12th Gen i7 12700k and a 3060Ti with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and the game plays well enough for me with DLSS enabled.
If you're a fan of Avatar though, the one thing I can't take away from this game is that it does transport you to that world, and the Snowdrop engine never disappoints.
The game feels like a Far Cry game with missions focusing on stealth or "going loud" as we colloquially call it. The quest system doesn't innovate beyond the normal Ubisoft formula, and this is what the game really needed to succeed in my opinion. Get ready for the same formula of attacking a large base to get experience, and working through a laundry list of tasks to get gear upgrades and to level up.
All-in-all, I will keep playing the game, and will probably enjoy it, but the game had the bones to be a great game, Ubisoft just needed to put the same love and attention into this IP adaptation that we saw out of games like Hogwarts Legacy earlier in the year. Hogwarts Legacy is still on sale at Steam until December 11th if you want to pick up a copy and see how companies can successfully adapt IP from a movie to a game.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was initially slated to be released in 2022 but was delayed until 2023. It doesn't seem like the delay was long enough though, and as already discussed the game would have likely benefitted from another 6 months to try to spruce up the quest system and storytelling. With mega-hits like Grand Theft Auto 6 confirmed to be releasing in 2025, there likely would have been a good window for Avatar to release in the summer of next year.
Avatar might continue the trend of a game being released with underwhelming reviews but later being viewed in a favorable light, such as Quantum Break after the release of Alan Wake 2. I can't give a full review of the game as I'm still playing through it, but hopefully, Ubisoft can continue to work on it to make it the kind of game that Avatar fans can be proud of.
