Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review

ign.com:

Short of somehow growing a Na’vi neural braid and jamming it directly into the base of James Cameron’s skull, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is pretty much your best option for taking a virtual tour of the stunning alien moon of Pandora. This open-world shooter serves up a mind bogglingly large slice of the fantastic fictional universe to explore, from staggeringly dense forest areas to picturesque open plains and properly intimidating mountain ranges both on land and suspended impossibly in the skies above. However, hidden amongst all that beauty is a disappointing amount of bloat, with copy-pasted enemy outposts and facilities that made venturing off the main story path far less rewarding than it has been in recent landmark adventures such as Elden Ring or the last two Legend of Zeldas. I still largely enjoyed the 25 hours I spent trying to fend off a resource-hungry human invasion, but I wish the environment itself had presented me with more compelling reasons to fight for it beyond its surface-level splendor.

I must admit that the two Avatar films have each impressed me far more on a technical level than they have with the quality of their storytelling, and in that regard Frontiers of Pandora remains true to its box office record-breaking inspiration. Set on an entirely new Western Frontier continent separate from the region where Jake Sully and family have played out two-thirds of a an apparently five-movie story arc, Frontiers of Pandora is an entirely standalone adventure with only minor references to the events of the films and, thankfully, not a single utterance of the word “unobtainium” – at least, not that I can recall.

Even so, its overall story arc doesn’t stray too far from the established series formula.