Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora nails the feeling of being a Na’vi, and that might be all it needs
Video game adaptations of movies are notoriously difficult to make, in part because it’s hard to capture a movie’s most defining features in gameplay. Fortunately, Ubisoft’s upcoming Avatar: Frontiers of Pandoraknows exactly what would make a video game adaptation of James Cameron’s movies fun: taking players to the moon of Pandora and giving them the feeling of running through its flora and fauna and soaring through its floating mountains.
The first-person action game, launching Dec. 7, takes place between the 2009 and 2022 movies, and puts the player in control of a Na’vi who was taken from their tribe and raised by the human-run Resources Development Administration (RDA), then put into cryosleep. After several years away, the player’s custom Na’vi emerges and reconnects with their tribe, only to find it very difficult to fit in. But when the RDA returns, the Na’vi clans need the help of every warrior they can get, so the player reluctantly gets taken back into the fold. All of this provides an interesting setup for the game, and illustrates a colder side of the Na’vi that we’ve never really seen them show toward their own kind before.
The original Avatar sold Pandora with a combination of incredible CGI and meticulous world-building, and Frontiers of Pandora is taking a similar approach. Despite my three hours with the game being played on Ubisoft’s remote play servers, it still looked fantastic (aside from some occasional choppiness on the part of the servers), with Pandora’s bright colors shining through the gorgeous jungles. But what was most impressive was how much the atmosphere feels like the Pandora of the movies. There’s an impressive density of plants that each react to your presence, there are twists of
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