Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hands-on — Far Cry but better

venturebeat.com:

I don’t know if you noticed, but the Avatar franchise is great. Last year’s The Way of Water was a gorgeous, moving film, and you’re missing out if you haven’t visited Pandora: World of Avatar over in Walt Disney World. So, yeah, I’m a fan. That’s why I was happy to get a chance to try a few hours of the upcoming game, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which comes out on December 7 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

My demo took place on PC via remote streaming. I got a good chance to run around Pandora, tame my Ikron (those flying dragon things) and complete a few story missions. And sure as the sky (and a Na’vi) is blue, I had a good time.

If you’ve ever seen a trailer for Frontiers of Pandora, you probably thought that it looks like an Avatar flavored Far Cry game. This is Ubisoft, after all. And well, yes, it is. It’s a first-person game set in an open world, you have to hunt and gather resources for crafting and you get to take out enemy bases.

But it also does a lot to make that old Far Cry formula interesting again. Notably, Pandora is just a beautiful setting for a game like this with all of its colorful, lush (and sometimes glow-in-the-dark-y) vegetation.

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Your Ikron also makes things a lot more interesting. The mission where I had to tame my Ikron was actually the highlight of my demo. I had to scale a mountain, which offered me some amazing views of Pandora, until I reached my prospective mount. Once tamed, you get access to the creature pretty much whenever you want. Yes, this means you can fly