I’ve Bear Grylls’d through countless open-worlds and know my way around a trigger, but Pandora still makes me jumpy. Just weirdly, uncharacteristically, on guard. Clutching a beefy rifle like a security blanket, I feel swallowed by this wind-lashed neon jungle looming around and above me (because creepy floating islands). In short, my interest is piqued. I’m in.
It’s not the visual busyness that’s unsettling, either. My smurf-cat ears are pricked to points, desperately trying to parse a 360-degree onslaught of roars, rustling, and my own clodhopping footfalls. I can’t sort this auditory overload between ambient trickery and actual threats out to eat my eyes for Jujubes.
The only thing I hear that makes 100% sense is a soundbite I recall from 2009’s Avatar: “You have a strong heart [Jake Sully],” Neytiri chides. “But stupid—ignorant, like a child.”
That’s me in a nutshell here. Like almost no sandbox has achieved in recent memory, this feels like I’m making baby steps through a weird, wonderful, and genuinely hostile alien environment. This fish-out-of-water uncertainty is fresh and invigorating.
TL;DR: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora already has the burgeoning signs of a target I want to hunt down and consume back at my Home Tree. At this point, I realise I may be preaching to a few mind’s-made-up-already diehards, and the preorder options below are intended for your specific needs. Everybody else can skip the window shopping to hear the rest of my impressions…
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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Deals
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Standard
Note: preordering gets you an exclusive Aranahe Warrior Pack.
PlayStation 5
Preorder at Mighty Ape – $79- Preorder at JB Hi-Fi – $89
- Get it digital on PS Store – $109.95
Xbox Series X/S
- Preorder at Mighty Ape – $79
- Preorder at JB Hi-Fi – $89
- Get it digital on MS Store – $109.95
PC
- Preorder on UbiStore – $99.95
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Gold Ed.
PlayStation 5
- Preorder at Mighty Ape – $148
Preorder at JB Hi-Fi – $149- Get it digital on PS Store – $159.95
Xbox Series X/S
- Preorder at Mighty Ape – $148
- Preorder at JB Hi-Fi – $149
- Get it digital on MS Store – $159.95
PC
- Preorder on UbiStore – $159.95
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Ultimate Ed.
PlayStation 5
- Get it digital on PS Store – $189.95
Xbox Series X/S
- Get it digital on MS Store – $189.95
PC
- Preorder on UbiStore – $189.95
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hands-on
The aforementioned skittishness I feel while traipsing across Pandora lessens as my demo continues, but never dissipates fully. This is pretty surprising because my…er, avatar in this Avatar is spry, self-sufficient in her craftiness, and bristling with offensive options. I’m talking a weapon wheel full of attitude-adjusters that’d get a thumbs up from Horizon’s Aloy. Not to mention there’s at least one strap to keep the FPS crowd happy—what looks to be a distant relative of an M41A Pulse Rifle.
Speaking of shooting, Avatar passes the all-important first test—it feels great as an FPS in my hands. Go in expecting a sci-fi Far Cry with similar responsive movement, the usual weapon handling and selection you’d expect, plus a sprint slide that I spam for fun. The only thing out of the ordinary is a double jump of sorts (used purely as a means to cushion one’s descent when falling).
Interestingly, though, it’s less the pew-pew and more the traversing through a living, breathing biome that takes the limelight. Ubi’s environmental artists have fashioned quite a vibrant, vast, and reactive forest. So much so, I find myself wanting to holster my weapon just so I can watch my character reflexively reach a paw out to fend off branches.
Much like me being anxious, the feeling to do minimal harm to this place is also strange for me because I’m usually the first guy to reach for the napalm and test your fire propagation system. Regardless, Pandora kinda bewitches me into respecting it as a gorgeous, delicate ecosystem that doesn’t deserve to be sullied. Not too much, at least—my gamer instinct to strip-mine everything not bolted down for craftables kicks in immediately. (This involves a small harvesting mini-game that rewards deft controller inputs with greater item yields.)
The only other unexpected thing is the occasional height shock. You’ll mostly forget this outside of combat because you’re a big creature who’s evolved to navigate their megaflora world, but your Na’vi self is a 10-foot beanpole. There’s a bit of extra power fantasy to be felt from mowing down Hobbit-sized humans who are only truly effective in superior numbers or when riding their mechs and VTOL gunships.
I didn’t know it going in, but all of the gunplay in my particular demo is at the tail end of my session. And so the bulk of my time is spent orienteering and platforming through quite a massive chunk of playspace that’s neatly sectioned into biome suburbs whose descriptions I jot down.
These biomes include Thorny Wilds, home to large predators; Wild Vines, entangled shrubbery with rocky ground coverage and aerial roots; and Bamboo Forests, lush undergrowth grazed by Hammerheads with a rich presence of fibers and harvest-able branches. I also find myself in Big Leaf biomes of deep shade and monstera trees; and Rainforests of mixed density, displaying a diverse range of trees brimmed with eggs and fruits. Better yet, these wildly different areas become stranger still when Pandora goes full disco trip kaleidoscope when night falls.
Just when I think the jungle itself is a sensory overload, I make the mistake of highlighting a fruit and clicking into the Hunter’s Guide menu. An absolute Wiki of flora, fauna, materials, and geographical region info pops up. Essentially, it seems like this area is stuccoed with stuff that either has some extra lore behind it, craftable use, or monetary value.
Obviously, that all feeds into a decently detailed personal progression system menu that’s nestled next to the Wiki. In a vaguely Destiny fashion, one can kit out their chest, arms, waist, and feet with fancier-looking threads that provide stat boosts or neat passive bonuses to stealth, attack, resistances, etc. Pretty standard stuff.
What’s perhaps less standard is Ubisoft’s clear desire to push me more towards the ol’ rocks and sticks approach to weaponry. I have a Staff Sling that lets me lob three types of ammo (but also comes with some flavour text that outs it as a “Na’vi children’s toy”). I also have a Heavy Bow and a Long Bow, plus it’s also worth noting that each weapon comes with a value rating, a unique trait (like an elemental or poison effect), and two slots for mods that will let you lean into certain tactics better.
Lastly, I sneak a peek into the Skills tree which offers roughly a dozen perks divided across what may become five or so disciplines. In a cool nod to the Na’vi lore, you’ll use Eywa to tap into the residual memories of a deceased Survivor, Warrior, Hunter, Maker, and more to evolve yourself. There are also Ancestor Skills that will become available if one can achieve a deep connection with Pandora, presumably in the late game.
After delivering some sort of sacred mangrove nectar, I’m treated to a reasonably well-acted and animated cutscene with my local elders. To paraphrase the next order they give me: please go forth and stick it to the Conquistador-esque humans. And you may as well deliver that death from above—tame yourself an Ikran.
The upward slog to said rookery is quite a fun, bespoke traversal section. I ascend my way through serpentine cave systems and environmental puzzles that involve tracing vines to shootable nodes or trampolining deftly to new areas via springboard flowers.
Once again, Ubi’s artisans bring out the big guns with a series of gorgeous mountain grottoes with running waterfalls, rainbow light refractions, and Pandora’s usual approach to night-light fungi and cave crystals. Better yet, I’m serenaded by stirring global music that wouldn’t sound out of place in The Lion King.
I won’t spoil the actual moment of bird bonding, as you deserve to experience it yourself. What I will say is that you can name your new pal from a list of ten, one of which is “Floof”. Obviously, this is what I do.
Once airborne, you’ll use your left stick to control speed and lateral strafes. Right stick is for turns, and if you want to camera-freelook, you’ll need to pull on L2. That setup is great for canyon slaloming and tracking enemies in front of you, but it’s tough to maintain awareness when you’ve got a VTOL on your (literal) tail.
It also has to be said that Avatar’s flight suffers from something that plagues many other open-world aerial experiences. High-level flight provides little sense of speed, no matter how many times you hammer the short-lived speed boost’ function on X. Conversely, low-level flight is great because landmarks whip past dangerously and vegetation reacts believably as you rip past or through it.
Once I do become a one-Na’vi Air Force, I wing off to show these humans—these wannabe Sky People—how it really gets done. I essentially conduct a series of air raids on a variety of hovering platforms that hold some sort of military value. That translates into short mid-air skirmishes where I pepper gunships with explosive rifle rounds. My inner child, who was raised on a strict diet of Panzer Dragoon games, digs these dogfights very much.
When I get cockier and more daredevil, I dismount onto those platforms from a good ten-metre height, cushion my freefall with a last-second double jump, and then lay down long-range bow fire at any VTOL who races to respond.
One quick note about bow use: there’s the Rambo-style satisfaction one usually earns from making a heli go kaboom, and then there’s the greater dopamine hit of correctly guessing the drop on a 7-foot-long arrow to skewer it through a cockpit and into the pilot within. (Plus a kaboom.)
The same sensation translates later when I’m planetside, stealth-infiltrating a sprawling complex and skewering mech operators with my Robin Hood skills. As per usual, I’m forced to go loud eventually, at which point the well-garrisoned RDA locust nest goes nuts. The ground forces show a middling degree of intelligence as they zero in on my last knowns. Par for the course pew-pew, really.
The tougher challenge comes after a 15-second warning, followed by the arrival of a Wyvern “super gunship”. This bastard will pound your general vicinity with sustained, sizeable AoE artillery fire, so overhead cover is a must to survive this phase. I’m honestly not sure if this enforcer can be downed. I find a cheese-tastic angle and slowly shred its considerable health bar to 0%, but it simply lumbers off to the horizon without further fireworks.
Was that a bug? I honestly couldn’t say. Just as I can’t rightly tell you if the isolated micro-load hitches I experienced were a symptom of demoing all of this online via a streaming solution. At this point, I’d chalk it up to preview build shenanigans.
Looking beyond those moments of scrappiness, I left my time on Pandora quite a bit more interested in Avatar than I was going in. The action feels like an interesting mish-mash of Far Cry and Horizon: Zero Dawn. The sandbox has all the insane world-building benefits of James Cameron’s obsessive attention to detail, plus an obvious infusion of new Ubi-provided lore. And I’m hanging to see if that mix can successfully smoosh in a decent Crimson Skies-esque dogfighting element.
One thing is certain for me: The initial feeling of exploring Pandora could be one of the most surprising, wonder-filled excursions I’ve had in years. I’m now looking forward to getting completely lost in that wilderness come December, most likely with my son in two-player co-op for double the fun.
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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora trailers
Adam Mathew is optimistic about this game. He also kind of misses 3DTV support.
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