Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a jaw-dropping but predictable adventure

videogameschronicle.com:

Within the first hour of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you’re taking down a base in order to clear some of the map.

Rarely does a game set its stall out quite so quickly. It’s almost overwhelming just how much Avatar’s opening hours feel like a blue-skinned Far Cry sequel, and while it does do some things to slightly refresh the formula, from a gameplay perspective, the game rarely gets more exciting than that.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora opens with the player cast as a Navi child who was kidnapped by the RDA (the human colonizers) and forced into a re-education program. During a failed breakout, your character suffers a tragedy that will inspire them to escape into the outside world, reconnect with their heritage, and rid Pandora of the RDA.

Avatar is a big-budget open-world game from a previous era. It’s a rather good one of those, and we can’t help get the feeling that if this game had dropped 5 years ago, it would have come across as far stronger, but open-world fatigue, specifically Ubisoft open-world fatigue, still hasn’t worn off.

You’re going around the world collecting crafting materials that can improve your gear by negligible amounts. You’re spending time in menus debating the merits of tiny stat buffs, only for the items to be quickly made irrelevant by mission rewards.

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The game offers two modes for the main campaign, each of which determines how much handholding the missions will offer you. One mode suggests general clues about where you should go next, or will tell you the name of a place rather than a specific quest marker, and it’s up to you to work out where you should go.

This is a much better way to play the game