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REVIEW: AVATAR FRONTIERS OF PANDORA

10.12.2023

Here are my thoughts on the new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game. There will be spoilers for the story and game features.

The following biases (could) affect my experience of the game, so please keep these in mind while reading my review:

• I played Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few days before playing this game. I keep involuntarily comparing the two games while playing FOP.
• I'm a 3D modeler/enthusiast and can probably notice stuff about video game models that other people don't care about.
• I do not like and do not play "shooter games", i.e. games focused on running around with a gun and shooting other people. Not because of a moral issue, I'm just really terrible at aiming and running for cover strategically while being shot at and panicking.
• I'm a massive Avatar fan. I have two fan clans with a bunch of hours of work sunk into each. I'll probably like anything Avatar-related.
• I have not finished the game yet. I'm currently around the point where you get your ikran.

Frontiers of Pandora is a first person game about you, a member of the lost Sarentu clan, growing up in the RDA "ambassador program" and being let loose on Pandora after the base is abandoned due to the events of the first movie. You relearn the Na'vi ways, including hunting, gathering resources, fighting and riding your ikran while also working with the resistance to stop the RDA from taking over your home. Here are some of its features and aspects in no particular order:

• Combat. You start out with a basic punch and a bow, which are luckily supplemented by a heavy bow, flinging-stick and machine gun later. The game gets significantly more fun once you have the machine gun, because fighting mech suit humans with arrows kinda sucks in the beginning when you don't do as much damage. I'm playing on the lowest difficulty possible, and I'm slowly getting the hang of the shooter-aspects of the game. I haven't yet tested aerial combat on the ikran.


• Gathering resources. I really love running around and collecting stuff in games, so I'm sold either way. Some stuff can just be picked up by pressing a button, some stuff requires additional controls, some stuff needs to be unlocked(??) somehow, for example by punching it open. What I don't like is the limited inventory, although there is a storage system you can access in certain places.
• Customisation. You can choose between a handful of hair styles and hair colors that all look the same, a few shades of yellow and one blue color for the eyes, a few stripe and glowing dot patterns and, finally, eye and face details. The latter have more options to choose from, but they're all presets, so don't expect sliders like in Sims for example. You can also choose between a male and female body and, separated from that, one of 3 voices. They sound like your dad, your mom and your teenage brother respectively. The best part about it is that you can change all of that at any time (you'll need to go to a special place though), so don't worry too much about customisation in the beginning as it's not final. Since this is a first person game, your looks don't matter too much anyway, although you can see your character from behind when flying an ikran. You also unlock body paint later and you can receive/buy/craft clothes.


• Ikrans. The quest to receive your ikran is a bit further in the game, so you'll need to play (and run everywhere) for a few hours before being able to fly. Unlike in the movies, you don't fight and wrestle it to connect your queues, it also doesn't choose you by trying to kill you – instead, you kinda see it following you around during the story and then "become friends" with it, for a lack of better words. You chase it around the ikran mountain place thingy, then press X to approach it and suddenly, boom, you're in the naming/customisation screen. I'm not a fan of it for lore reasons, as "walking up to it and becoming friends" is something only Kiri, someone with an extraordinary connection to Eywa, could do in canon and it was treated as something very special and rare.
  I also ran into an immersion-breaking bug during this scene, as the "press x to approach" dialogue didn't show up and I just kept walking towards the ikran, falling backwards as it angrily flapped its wings at me and then repeating that process over and over until I touched the exact pixel on the ground that triggered the dialogue.
  You can choose a name for your ikran from a limited list of names – it will be actually said out loud by your character during the game though, so that's a plus. You can also choose from a handful of color patterns for it. Both of these choices are final, although you can get more color patterns later.
  Flying is very very fun and hey, you can actually see your character in third person for once! From behind and kinda small, but still, you see it. You can also call it and it'll come to you from afar, but I haven't yet tested if that has a distance limit like the horses have in RDR2.


• Hunting. It's very reminiscient of RDR2, because you focus your senses by pressing a button and follow scent trails of the animal you're tracking. You also (later) unlock the ability to see weak spots on animals and enemies, which makes killing them easier. I like it, although the limited inventory kinda dampens the fun when you can't collect the materials. You can also cook the meat (together with other stuff you can forage for) and create stat-boosting dishes. The food looks tasty, hehe.


• The look. Now, "bad" is a bit too much, but I'm playing both this and RDR2 on the highest possible settings and RDR2 just looks better. The Pandoran forests and landscapes are beautiful for the most part, but there are definitely moments where I'm not as immersed because I feel like I'm in a fake video game environment. I think the forced first person perspective doesn't help, because you can get really really close to things and point out the flaws. In the ikran taming scene/name & color picking screen, I could point out the edges on the ikran's not-so-round eye.


• Climbing. When it works, it's very fun and fluid. When it doesn't, i.e. when you're trying to go somewhere you're not supposed to, you kinda start clipping into the walls and seeing pixelated textures. It can get frustrating, especially in the beginning where you don't really know where to go. Some parts of the world have a very obvious "correct" way to climb up that the game expects you to take.


• Characters. Oh boy. I don't like any of the characters from the resistance HQ section of the game. You really feel like you're talking to fake video game NPCs, especially when you've spent some time around the base and hear the same two lines of dialogue each character has to say. One character is kind of annoying (you'll know which one I mean when you meet them), the rest are nothing-burgers I don't really feel anything for. This is especially tragic for the first main Na'vi group you start out with, as you were all raised together on the RDA base and now need to discover the lost ways of your clan together. The game just doesn't give me a reason to care about them and what they go through, as they become pretty much irrelevant once you leave the resistance HQ section. (Not sure if that'll change later in he game) Once you reach the Aranahe Na'vi clan, it gets better – you still get video game character vibes from them, but the characters are much more interesting, less annoying and you actually feel inclined to help them.
• Item wheel. You don't have a "classic" inventory with a huge grid that allows you to pick an item, you have an "item wheel" you can bring up with the press of a button like in RDR2. Unlike RDR2 though, the game doesn't pause/slow down when you're in this menu, so quickly crafting arrows/choosing food while you're being shot at from all sides can get very stressful.
• UI. I wasn't sure what to name this section, but hopefully you'll understand what I mean. You can only interact with objects/characters once the "press (whatever) to (interact)" dialogue shows up. Sometimes, you have to look at/approach objects from a very very specific angle to get the dialogue to appear, which can be annoying at best and immersion-breaking at worst (see ikran section). Sometimes interactable objects are even hard to notice, because the game assumes you're approaching them from the "correct" angle (see climbing section) and doesn't account for the fact that you can freely move around and take your own paths through the world.

In conclusion, I like the game and will continue to play it, but I think I have an easier time overlooking its flaws because I'm an Avatar fan who just wants to run around on Pandora as a bloo peopol.