Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Preview – Can it be more than a blue alien Far Cry?

thesixthaxis.com:

After more than a decade in suspended animation, Avatar is well and truly here to stay. Alongside the films, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is looking to capture every facet of the vibrantly realised alien world, its cultures and the battle between natives and human invaders.

Avatar still feels like a strange outlier within modern media. The original film launched in 2009, breaking box office records as so many rushed to see its stunning technical filmmaking achievements (even if 3D movies ended up being a fad), but equally being criticised or mocked for its, shall we say, overly familiar narrative. That its 2022 sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, ended up being another multi-billion dollar film was perhaps a slight surprise, given the widely professed apathy towards its announcement and trailers – then again, how apathetic can you be if you need to proclaim it so proudly on the internet?

While some parts of the film stories can be easily mocked – ‘Unobtanium’ for one – what James Cameron managed to do so brilliantly was to create a vibrant alien world filled with unusual sights and moments of wonder. From the creature design, to the plant life of this jungle-filled world, the bioluminescence that glows up the setting at night, to the physical manifestation of the Na’vi link to nature, it was a real treat to see this rendered in such fantastic fashion.

One of the first things that struck me when sitting down to play Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, was how well this game manages to pull the same trick. Unlike the 2009 movie tie-in, we’re now at a point where PCs and consoles can really throw around the same kinds of cutting edge visual techniques that are used in films, in particular with ray-traced reflections and shadows (for