Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - The First Preview

ign.com:

Since its gameplay reveal earlier this year, it’s been hard to shake the idea that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is essentially a Far Cry game with a sci-fi setting. That’s not an incorrect assumption for several reasons; this is a wilderness-set first-person game with plants to harvest, animals to hunt, outposts to assault, and items to be crafted. But during a recent two-hour hands-on I discovered that Frontiers of Pandora has a more interesting set of ideas built atop that Far Cry skeleton. I certainly never expected to put the controller down and be thinking more about Mirror’s Edge and Horizon: Zero Dawn than I was about the classic Ubisoft formula.

If you’ve watched either of James Cameron’s box office-busting Avatar films, you’ll know the world of Pandora is a vast, knotted rainforest of towering trees, floating mountains, and bizarre plant life. The blue-skinned, cat-like Na’vi who call the planet home can gracefully navigate that jungle at speed, sprinting along branches and leaping between boughs. That’s exactly what you do in Frontiers of Pandora. Developer Massive Entertainment has effectively made a jungle parkour system that feels like a cousin of the freerunning in Mirror’s Edge.

It begins with your Na’vi protagonist’s strong leap which boosts you up into and between tree branches. Handholds that are beyond your grasp can often be reached via trailing vines that lift you up like organic elevators. The ground is carpeted by helpful flora, such as bounce pad-like orange fungi and plants that emit a speed-enhancing blue mist. It wasn’t long until I began to recognise running routes through the rainforest – pathways of blue haze that led to vines, which linked to branch networks. Beyond those developer-plotted