It’s easy to underestimate just how good James Cameron is at what he does, at least until someone tries to copy his homework, like when Michael Bay set out to turn Pearl Harbor into the next Titanic. Now, with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, we have a piece of media trying to do the same but within Cameron’s own universe. And to the extent that the game doesn’t have you play as Jake Sully and allows you to explore Pandora on your own—that is, the experience isn’t guided by Cameron’s directorial hand—the attempt isn’t without merit.
It helps that Frontiers of Pandora ably captures the breathtakingly vast biodiversity of Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, as well as channels their sense of expansiveness. But even as much as Cameron’s epic films can be taken to task for not building a strong enough story worthy of the big, beautiful world at their center, Frontiers of Pandora repeats Cameron’s mistakes as well as those of Ubisoft, which is infinitely more disappointing.
It’s not for lack of a good hook either. The game’s opening hours introduce us to our protagonist, an unnamed player-created Na’vi of the previously unseen Sarentu tribe, which has been nearly wiped out by the Resources Development Administration—i.e., Pandora’s military-industrial human colonizers. In typical colonizer fashion, the children are allowed to survive only to be raised and indoctrinated in top secret lab captivity by the RDA.
Things go pear-shaped for the RDA after Jake Sully’s big Dances with Wolves-style revolt on the other side of Pandora, and it gives the Sarentu kids and their sympathetic teacher an opening to escape the lab and try to rejoin the Na’vi. Being raised in a human lab, though, the game’s protagonist has nearly no connection with the planet or its people anymore.
There are seeds of a fascinating game here, of an orphaned indigenous child finally getting the opportunity to learn the ways of their people. Indeed, Frontiers of Pandora’s positives mostly come down to you having to learn how to read Pandora’s landscape, using your Na’vi senses to recognize plants and animals on sight, finding out where to hit animals during hunts to get a clean/merciful kill, bonding with ikran—Pandora’s beautiful flying dragons—and reconnecting with Pandora’s planetary deity Eywa. Which makes it all the more disappointing that there’s so very little of the beautiful, invented Na’vi language in the game.
The bigger disappointment here is that the consideration and care that comes with learning how to be a Na’vi is at war with the same tired glut of activities that Ubisoft copies and pastes into the vast majority of their modern games. (Malmö-based developer Massive Entertainment is a studio of the publisher.) That’s evident here in everything from the gated level-based progression, to the tower raids against RDA strongholds, to the extent to which you’re drowned with sidequests long before you get to the next story beat, regardless of urgency.
The game’s crafting system almost meets the Ubisoft ethos in the middle. Instead of just mindless grabbing anything not nailed down in the environment, gathering ingredients is a mindful task. The quality of crafted items found in nature requires more attention to time of day, to ensure whether a plant is ripe or ready to harvest, and forethought about how human weapons, despite being more effective in fights, can absolutely destroy natural resources.
But so much of that work goes toward such meager upgrades, either in the drab look of much of your earned clothing and armor, or in the often-single-digit stat upgrades. It will surprise absolutely no one that some of the prettiest armor is gated behind microtransactions.
Frontiers of Pandora is, in essence, just another Far Cry experience—one with breathtaking art direction and a thoughtful portrayal of an alien culture, but a Far Cry experience nonetheless. It’s a tired formula applied to a property that’s capable of showing us much more. This game’s Pandora is a beautiful place to visit, but living there makes for a boring existence.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Ubisoft.
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