Ubisoft released its new game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. This is a classic project from a French company with an open world, crafting, exploration and story in the background. The game is visually almost perfect, and also atmospheric, but there are enough flaws here. I have already played, and not without problems, so I share them and other impressions in the review below.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

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Pros:

the detailed, beautiful and atmospheric world of Pandora; nice modern graphics; realistic and exciting nature of the planet, which is simply fun to navigate

Buy in the Ubisoft Store

Cons:

bugs with the main quest, which allowed to pass it normally; there is very little activity on the big map; monotonous boring tasks and a limited number of their types and types; obsessive crafting and pumping of the hero; mediocre combat system; most weapons are not felt

Buy in the Ubisoft Store

Return to Pandora

The main events of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora take place in the same time as the second film in the series of the same name, Avatar: The Way of Water. The plot tells about the children of one of the Na’vi tribes, which was destroyed by the RDA corporation. The bad people took them for “re-education”, but a few years later, during the second large-scale attack on the planet Pandora, as teenagers they escape from the human base.

Next, the heroes join the ranks of the rebel movement against the RDA, and we play as one of these teenagers, who rediscovers his home planet after years of “correct upbringing”. We learn together with him, which adequately and logically introduces the hero and the player himself into the amazing world of Pandora.

Next, I would like to tell more or less in detail about the plot, but here I have almost nothing to say. The fact is that about 3-4 hours into the plot, one of the quests crashed and did not continue. There is no quick save here, as well as the ability to switch to previous save versions. So at first I decided to wait for the update, but then I saw that I was already playing version 1.01, so I could wait a long time for the next update, and I don’t have much time.

So I restarted the game, got to the same quest a few hours later and what do you think? He jammed again, but already a little further. My attempts to return to it after various tasks did not give results, and I did not wait for another update, which, by the way, might not fix this bug. That’s why I didn’t start over for the third time. I didn’t have time anymore, and I was annoyed enough not to do it on principle.

I was actually forced to leave the plot and go explore the world, do other quests, gain reputation, clear roadblocks/bases, level up a character, etc. After all, this is what makes Ubisoft games stand out? Truth? Was it supposed to be good after all? Actually no.

I later found out that flying on the screen wouldn’t be available to me either because of that buggy quest, because getting my own flying animal was later. My mood and impressions of the game became more and more “better” and brighter.

Conquering new peaks

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has a huge map with many activities. They all fall into multiple categories and repeat, and repeat, and repeat. It is necessary to destroy the RDA checkpoint, or their plant, which threatens the nature of the planet. Research labs can also be searched and opened. And there are huge ancestral flowers that unlock additional skills.

Here and there you meet merchants or other Na’vi who supply the hero with various gifts and collectibles, tell interesting stories, and sometimes ask for help with one or another task. Quests are often investigations. Here, the hero needs to find a human or Na’vi, but for this, certain actions must be taken to connect the evidence on the spot. Usually the work of the detective ends with a fight with the RDA or the local fauna, and then everything goes around in a circle.

Despite the giant map and relatively enough NPCs scattered across it, large chunks of territory are generally empty. There is only nature and animals, but no activity, interesting encounters or anything. You can run for five or even ten minutes from one task to another and not meet anyone.

You can still hunt local animals, but it is not as easy as it seems. Most of them have full armor, bite painfully and kill if they hit certain vulnerable points. Meat and additional materials are used to prepare food. It gives bonuses for some time, lets you craft or pump clothes or weapons.

Equipment in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is not tied to the level of the character, it has different levels determined by colors. The part can be found through quests and in various hiding places at RDA bases, bought from merchants, or created independently.

The hero gains experience for literally every action, but levels are gained relatively slowly. For each of them, a skill point is given, which is distributed in a fairly simple skill tree. There is an improvement in the combat characteristics of the hero, an increase in the amount of energy, health, the contents of the bag for cartridges or arrows, etc. The Ancestral Flowers mentioned above unlock individual shards. There are a limited number of them on the map and each flower gives a specific skill that can be viewed before hunting for it.

Our hero Na’vi knows how to use both the weapons of people and his own tribesmen. These are different types of bows, devices for throwing bombs, machine guns, shotguns, etc. Shooting something in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is not very fun and comfortable. Weapons don’t listen well to the gamer’s commands, and various bows feel relatively normal, especially large ones. He hits powerfully, even the equipment and shoots relatively quickly. Of the human toys for destroying enemies, I more or less liked the shotgun.

Beauty without depth

The biggest advantages of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are the graphics and the beauty of the surrounding world. Pandora in the game is beautifully done and detailed. There are a lot of different plants, flowers and animals. A forest or a field or a mountainous area, but there is always life here: someone is chirping somewhere, some creatures are crawling along the trunk of a fallen tree, strange plants are trying to grab you, poison or hurt you. Animals are grazing or hunting, you or other animals, they snort, cluck, hiss, snap, howl, etc.

Every step, every minute outside of any human structures makes you believe that you are really on Pandora. Also impressive are the various buildings of the Na’vi tribes, which are organically embedded in nature and are part of it. The colors here are always bright and juicy, the weather changes like day and night.

Because of this detailed nature and multi-tiered level design, I enjoyed just moving from one quest to the next without fast-forwarding. The character can run on the ground, push off special plants and accelerate. He can also move on the “second floor” by skillfully climbing trees with the help of other special plants and jumping like a monkey. There is a certain vibe in this, and when you later get used to the management and discover the features of this world, such a trip puts the brain in a state of flow. It’s just you and Pandora. On the one hand, this is a very unusual and pleasant experience, and on the other hand, it is a shame that running between quests is more pleasant than completing them.

I played Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora on PlayStation 5 in Quality mode on a 4K TV. Switched to “Productivity”, but I had better fun in the first option. Here, the graphics are as detailed as possible, and a moderate number of fps does not interfere with the game at all.

In the 13 hours I managed to spend in the game, it was painted once. We also remember the bug with one of the story quests, which happened twice. It seems like a small number of technical problems, but as you can see, one serious error is enough to significantly affect the experience of the game, its features, and the mood of the gamer.

I understand that this time is clearly not enough, but it was more than enough to form an impression of the game, get a share of the negative and positive, and decide on an assessment. Yes, the plot probably takes 30-35 hours plus another 10-20 hours, if not more, to explore the world. But will anyone do it for that long? Here is the main question. I definitely don’t, because I don’t want to start all over again for the third time. It is not a fact that it will not be repeated in the same place, or somewhere further along the plot.

If I bought this game at full price and didn’t get a code from the studio and I got these bugs, I probably wouldn’t have continued to play, and would have returned the game with a bad attitude and abuse.

Also, this bug greatly changed my gameplay, and my actions – I was deprived of a significant part of the content, I could not banally fly on the screens, and I went through the same thing twice more. And the beginning here is not as interesting as James Cameron’s film. On the contrary, it is too drawn out and faded. Therefore, as you probably already understood, my impressions of the game are mostly negative. And in my opinion it is well deserved.

Conclusion:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a classic Ubisoft project, but at its worst. It’s a beautiful game with bright modern graphics and an almost perfectly constructed nature of Pandora. It’s just nice to walk and run here, but it’s more interesting to do it than the local quests. Apart from the nature itself, the map in the game is empty, the activities are boring. Probably, my experience and impressions would have been more pleasant if I had not caught a bug twice (!) on the same story quest 3-4 hours after starting the game. It was incredibly frustrating and changed my experience, because I had to play through the game, and there was no time for a third attempt. It is not a fact that this time everything would not happen again.

Therefore, I do not recommend playing this game to anyone except fans of projects from Ubisoft. However, they may also have this bug and then I would like to look at their desire to start over or be left without a certain amount of content. An interesting alternative, yes? I love Yubik games, especially The Division series. But I’d rather go clean up a snowy New York after a virus in an eight-year-old game than return to the vivid and more detailed world of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora once again.

Buy in the Ubisoft Store