Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review in Progress

thesixthaxis.com:

Humans are horrible. You don’t need an allegory about the environment filled with blue aliens to tell you that. However, the joy of James Cameron’s Avatar isn’t in its humans, or the azure Na’vi, it’s in the vibrant, living world of Pandora. From the instant you start Frontiers of Pandora, it’s clear that Ubisoft has done an incredible job bringing this world to life, and while you bathe in the neon glow of its incredible wildlife, you’ll discover a people whose lives and culture you’ll want to protect.

The opening of our tale sees you experience some severe childhood trauma, as you’re ‘saved’ by the RDA, who are conducting a human/Na’vi programme that’s supposed to be about intertwining cultures but is mostly about training Na’vi to be soldiers within the human military complex. This is less about protection and more about abduction, but when Jake Sully starts a revolution, this little experiment is supposed to meet a vicious end. Fortunately, you’re saved by your tutor, and put into a cryogenic slumber until the time is right for you to be extracted. As it turns out, that’s at the exact moment that the RDA also make their return to this part of Pandora, and you’re suddenly a part of the resistance fighting them off.

That mention of Jake Sully may, if you’ve watched the Avatar movies, make you think that this is part of the mainline Avatar storyline, but while it’s set in the same period and has the occasional nod to or mention of Jake’s disruptive shenanigans, this is a separate storyline set on the other side of the planet. It’s a good decision, not least because Jake’s somewhat worthy fight has already been played out across many hours of cinema, but because you can forge your own identity within the Na’vi people.

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