Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Hands-On Impressions – Na’vigating Another Ubisoft Open World

wccftech.com:

James Cameron’s Avatar franchise has always felt like a very natural fit for the realm of video games – honestly, the movies already kind of feel like games – and yet, It’s never really worked out. Ubisoft made a weak attempt at making an Avatar game back in 2009 and, until now, that’s been about it. Well, Ubisoft is taking another crack at it with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a new large-scale open-world adventure from The Division developer Massive Entertainment set to launch in December.

I recently had the opportunity to go hands-on with the PC version of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, playing through four interconnected missions amounting to a little over two hours of gameplay. This hands-on session was conducted remotely via the cloud, but Ubisoft’s streaming tech was up to snuff, as I didn’t detect any serious input lag or artifacts. So, does Massive deliver the goods, or is a quality Avatar game a piece of onobtainium we’ll never quite grasp? Scroll on for my initial impressions.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora casts players as a Na’vi orphan who was taken and trained by the RDA but eventually reintegrates into Na’vi society after awakening from suspended animation. While players will, appropriately, be able to fully customize their avatar, I was provided with a premade one for my demo session. The quest chain I made my way through began simply enough, as the Kinglor (moth-like creatures important to your tribe) are being disturbed by something the RDA is doing. Of course, It’s up to the player to find out what’s up.

My first objective was to find a specific type of nectar to help the Kinglor, which was your typical Ubisoft “run in the direction of the map marker” quest. That said, the quest gave me a good opportunity