Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora preview – A great game for your dad
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has positioned itself quite nicely in this hellish year for video game releases. While Baldur’s Gate 3 is digging up trees, the Dead Space Remake is dumping oil in the water and Resident Evil 4 is pouring concrete on flowers, Avatar is perched over in December away from the madness. As such, it’s not unreasonable to look at it as a nice year-ender. A Christmas present for a loved one, or an avenue for fun over the holidays. But how well does it actually play?
I was given a glimpse at that answer, courtesy of Ubisoft who provided a two-hour preview window earlier this month. Dropped onto Pandora early in the story with the unmistakable lush greenery ahead of me, I got to work exploring the game.
The primary thought walking into and out of the preview was whether Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was essentially a Far Cry game with a blue coat of paint. It kind of is! You can certainly feel the bones of a Far Cry game in there. The first-person action is punchy, but simple. There’s room to experiment and flex your style, but not too much. It’s an incredibly easy game to get into – which makes sense! If you’re making an Avatar game you want Avatar fans to jump into it. This means that Avatar is an unoffensive product, for good and ill.