Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review: a visual spectacle held back by old ideas

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora continues a long tradition in gaming of titles you play just to be smacked around the chops by the graphics; this is a lavish, technically brilliant open world held back by old ideas and overly familiar gameplay. I’ve been here before, from Shadow of the Beast to The Getaway to The Order: 1886; I’ve always found time to enjoy beautiful games with basic gameplay and I really don’t mind retreading old ground to experience one of the most graphically impressive games yet for PS5.

Massive Entertainment’s Snowdrop engine has always been good game engine, but this revised version created for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora just blows the roof off my PS5. The game begins in familiar muted sci-fi territory, with my Na'vi, a captured child, being ‘reprogrammed’ for a future war. 

Naturally it all goes wrong; my Na’vi’s sister is murdered by those evil ‘sky people’ before my character is cryogenically frozen for a decade, waking during the events of the first movie and before those of Way of the Water. I run for the exit, literally breaking out from an old grey world to a new one blasted with colour and detail. You can almost sense a watershed moment as PlayStation 5 finally shrugs off the drag of PS4.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: run Na'vi, run

There’s a bit of hand-holding in the early stages as you meet with ‘good’ rebel humans who are aiding the Na’vi to repel the polluting ‘bad’ humans and save the world of Pandora from following Earth’s path to become a poisoned planet. Once the setup is over, however, you’re free to roam and explore, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora works better if you just forget about the main story and simply run free.

It’s actually very easy to forget this game’s story, because it’s the most uninteresting and uneventful aspect of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The game wants you to spend so much time experiencing its world it really does elbow out of view its own drama. I spent twenty hours jumping, swimming and flying around Pandora and never gave my character’s quest for revenge a second thought.

Pandora really is a stunning creation; a vast and complex truly alien world that feels handmade and artisan. This open world is a sensory assault of colour and dappled light; waterfalls and Roger Dean-like floating islands; thick forests of densely populated plant life give way to meandering streams and deep canyons. This all flies along at 60fps with ray tracing on PS5, ensuring it looks deep, rich and real. 

Open world games have impressed in recent years, and Horizon: Forbidden West had a striking visual design, but it lacks the sense of life that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora delivers. As you move through Pandora plants react to you, not by simply moving from under your feet or as you bush past, these alien flora actually retract and veer away or reach for you. Ray tracing is used to guide the audio too, every plant in your vicinity has an assigned audio queue, which means if you hear rustling nearby it’s genuinely a creature stalking you behind the wall of greenery.     

No doubt, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment have crafted a vivid and naturalistic alien world that impresses at every turn, but what you do in Pandora’s jungles, plains and foothills isn’t quite so groundbreaking. 

This is a typically Ubi-game experience; Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a tick-list of modern open world game design - fetch questing, crafting, stealthing and shooting. The map creeps open and un-fogs little by little with each polluting factory you destroy, human bases you wipe out, and with each Na’vi you help (why are so many locals always getting lost in their own world?). You’ve done this countless times in Far Cry, Horizon and myriad other open world games.

It can be satisfying and I do have a soft-spot for Ubi-tick sheet gaming; taking apart a large human base, arrowing mechs, setting off gas fires and fleeing to cover is a sight to see, but it’s hardly new.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: blue heaven?

There are a lot of different ideas meshed together in here too, from Monster Hunter: World-like food preparation and survival, including creature profiling and weak spot targeting (get a clean kill to fillet better resources) to a basic ‘investigation’ system that sees you link scan and link glues in a scene to uncover what happened, which always leads to a Na’vi scent trail to follow. (Yep, it’s the same one that appeared in Assassin's Creed.) So you’re not shy of things to do, and even more reasons to not keep on that sister-revenge track.

Combat is solid but rarely exciting; it improves over time as you’re able to mod bows and guns to have more control and impact, but generally you’re never straying away from your basic bow and arrows mixed in with an overpowered shotgun that takes down, well… everything. A nice touch is the hunting gameplay, as using human weapons will ruin animal resources harvested from dead prey, so you’re encouraged to go with less powerful and more satisfying bows and arrows. 

Being an Ubisoft open world you can often use the game’s world and dumb AI to your advantage by nipping at powerful enemies from a distance with grenades and heavy arrows, often from heights the enemy can't reach. In doing so I took over a number of human compounds above my XP level and snagged a wildly powerful shotgun early on in the game. Those wasted years playing Ghost Recon Wildlands and Far Cry 6 finally paid off, because I’m doing the exact same thing only as a 9ft blue cat-alien.

The game’s broader resource-based systems are equally familiar, and come burdened with the same flaws as other open world games. You’re too often overburdened by a pouch crammed with animal gubbins and plant bits that may or may not come in handy at some point. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora falls into the open world design  trap of trying to convince you thinking a 3% wildlife damage buff on a new bracelet is worthwhile. 

For those who do love crafting tiny advances in weapons and gear then you’ll be at home on the plains and sky-rocks of Pandora. There’s a lot to make, and new cosmetic designs are unlocked by talking to the main Na’vi tribes or finding random camps and expeditions who are only too keen to share their designs. 

Rather than sell on loot and resources you donate it to tribes in return for trust and favours; the more a tribe likes you the more they’ll help you out. Getting to know a tribe reveals new side quests and crafting designs, which is a nice idea and cleverly buys into the Avatar licence.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: make it snow

What really matters in Avatar is, funnily enough, Avatar. While many of the ideas in the game have been seen before in previous Ubisoft titles, developer Massive Entertainment has managed to capture the spirit of the films perfectly. Traversal through the world is a joy, and mixes in parkour gameplay with beast riding and a serious sense of scale as vertical climbing and tree-jumps become second nature. 

Massive Entertainment knows its Snowdrop-made Pandora is a wildly stunning space to explore and simply wants you to run riot across its dense and complex vitas, its maze of gigantic trees and iconic curved rock formations. This can lead to some very alien scenes that make you stop in your tracks and reach for Photo Mode, and it can also throw-up some, frankly, goofy gameplay moments - some plants and vines can be used as trampolines and catapults, one offers a temporary speed boost to link parkour lines. 

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora can feel like it's weighed down by its own content, there’s just so much to do and keeping track of it can feel unwieldy and distract from the joy of Pandora and the technical achievement of doing this on a PS5. It can also push any notion of a mainline story to the back of your mind - back further, actually, it’s pushed out of view altogether. Devoid of a meaningful main event Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora lacks a central driving force other than exploration for exploration’s sake.

This is definitely, absolutely, one of those games; Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a technical marvel that demands to be experienced but lacks focus. I’d recommend the game to anyone who wants to really see what their PS5 can do, and it’s fun in short runs to simply take in the world, but behind the visual magic, you’ve run these trails countless times.