You'll have to forgive the photomode spam, I ended up almost keeping a diary with the amount of photos I took!

There's a real magic about this game where Massive Entertainment have done what I've always thought is one of the hardest things to do - transport you to a different world. It's strange, it feels like you're stepping into a rainforest on earth but it's so vibrant and the sense of scale is incredible. The diversity of life around you is almost palpable, insects buzz around, flying creatures soar overhead, and trees tower above. You feel like a tiny part of a living and breathing world, a jigsaw piece that slots in with all the other creatures and Na'vi that roam the map.

For me the game really excels at these moment to moment experiences where you feel like you're living in the world, and the story does a pretty good job of living out the primitive fantasy - it flows pretty naturally from one event to the next, introducing you to different clans along the way. The performances during cutscenes are excellent, but the overall story arch they're going for just really didn't grab me at all. Am I glad they decided to focus on the natives of Pandora almost exclusively as opposed to the humans? Absolutely, but unfortunately it's still not the heartfelt story I was hoping for.

Say what you want about politics in video games but I've always found Avatar to be a really interesting case study for our own relationship with nature and our planet. The relationship between Pandora and the Na'vi is one of harmony, it's illustrated beautifully in-game through the clothes, building designs, food, ceremonies, animals, and communities within the clans. The relationship between Pandora and the humans is one of destruction and death. Seeing the decay and rot surrounding the manmade machine structures as you approach and navigate them is a really powerful image.

Combat is a big part of the game and thankfully the bows and other projectile weapons all feel nice to use. Traversing the map on foot takes some time to get used to in first person, but once I mastered the jumping it added another layer of immersion where you feel like a Na'vi jumping from tree top to tree top, it's great! Unfortunately as soon as they introduce you to the flying mechanics it sort of makes going on foot redundant (I feel like this happens with a lot of games whenever a quicker mode of transport is introduced).

Hunting and gathering is also a big part of the game, I loved this aspect as it meant that you had to get up close and personal with the wildlife. There's bark you need to rip off trees, meat and fruit for recipes, moss, there really is quite a variety and I kinda loved identifying all the plants as you roam around. There's a database in the pause menu to catalogue everything too. Overall a really nice gameplay element that I felt tied everything together and emphasised the relationship that the Na'vi have with nature.

If you love nature documentaries, gorgeous visuals, and open worlds you'll almost definitely have a good time with this. It's typical Ubisoft formula but with a bit more love and attention poured into it than I'm used to. Definitely one to sit back with, take your time, and enjoy the scenery.

So I bought Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora during my winter break, because I was in a mood for Ubisandbox, and people kept mentioning it's Far Cry with blue aliens... Well, I disagree, so yeah, it's time for another review. This one won't take 30 hours to read, pinky promise (If you have the time, tho, go read my FFXVI review, it's lit). I played the game on my PS5.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is an open world game based on highly acclaimed blockbuster movies directed by James Cameron. If you lived in a cave for the past 20 years, the franchise tells a story about human invasion on Pandora, a breathtaking planet inhabited by Na'vi race, the blue aliens that aren't too advanced just yet. They live in tribes, connected to nature, without any advanced tech. Evil humans called the "RDA" decided to exploit Pandora and the Na'vi for their own purposes, which resulted in corrupting the planet, killing wildlife, firing forests, capturing and studying their kids, and more. The whole franchise is a sci-fi take on colonialism, You get the idea. When it comes to the movies, Avatar didn't have a revolutionary story, that claimed hearts of millions, it had stunning visuals that everyone wanted to see. Well, Frontiers of Pandora is not different. It's an okay game, but oh boy... Pandora is just jaw-dropping.

I will start with the fact, that I really liked the movies. The plot was fun (not too ambitious, tho) and the visuals were stunning. Yeah, that's Avatar summed up. That said, I'm not a diehard fan or something, I just enjoyed them. That's why I didn't have high expectations for the game, I just wanted a sandbox to play, so I could listen to podcasts in the background. Well, that's when Avatar surprised me, because I actually liked the game... a lot.

Alright, let's start with the juicy stuff, the graphics. This game is just absolutely staggering.I just couldn't believe how beautiful is this game. I've played most of so-called graphics benchmarks and Avatar is something else. It is the best looking game you can currently buy, no contest. Pandora is a stunning place, and the devs did it justice. There is no reason for me to google more synonyms for beautiful, You just have to witness it yourself, preferably on 4k TV. The game is packed with three totally different biomes, they are all outstanding, yet very different. I just couldn't wait to discover more of Pandora, to truly witness the beauty of it, when was the last time, when I explored purposely to consume more of astonishing graphics? Never, ladies and gentlemen. Never. This is officially the first time, when I cleared the map, just to see more and more pretty places. There is nothing else to explore, just beautiful landscapes... and it's enough, that's how good this game looks. The game has an amazing weather system, too. It can completely change the mood and set up the atmosphere. There is another mechanic in the game, where land captured by RDA is corrupted. Plants in these areas are dead, wildlife is gone and everything is dark and gritty. After you recapture these places, everything goes back to life, which is just awesome to witness. As I said, you play to see the beauty of Pandora, and destroying these outposts kinda unlock you new juicy places to see. Clearing the pollution is always cool, but it will never be as cool as in this game.

Sadly, you have to pay with performance to keep witnessing this godlike graphics, and you have to pay a lot. Performance mode looks much, MUCH WORSE, and it's pretty inconsistent. This game is literally just visuals, so I didn't bother with it for more than 5 minutes. Fidelity mode is the correct way to play the game. Unfortunately, Ubisoft isn't really known for buttery smooth 30 fps, so it's a hard pill to swallow. But yeah, it's mostly in 30 fps with occasional drops here and there, You get used to it, and getting used to it is worth it.When it comes to bugs, I didn't encounter any of them, except one buggy animation. When you summon your flying mount too close to the surface, but far enough to actually summon it, the animation won't play, and you will just awkwardly respawn in the air on your Ikran, no biggie. I've seen people mentioning glitchy side-quests, but it didn't happen to me.

What is the next thing we want in a stunning open-world? Immersion. Thankfully, I find Avatar very immersive. There is barely any HUD in the game, menus fit the vibe, that mode that lets you see highlighted items, enemies and objectives is actually explained with Na'vi senses which is pretty acceptable, the map (I mean that one in menus) is filled with clouds at first, and you uncover it as you travel, which is pretty damn cool, NPCs are excited to see you, they often offer you some gifts, advices, or they mark things on your map, yeah, I can honestly say the game really is immersive. There is even a mode for hardcore explorers, it removes markers from the minimap, and you actually have to find your objectives by using descriptions of locations. I tried to play with that for a bit, but it was too hard for me. It was more frustrating, than fun, but I'm sure it will find its fans. It's a bold thing to say, but I had a tiny Breath of the Wild feeling from this game's exploration. You know, the "Ohhhh, that's so cool, I have to go there and see it" feeling, except in Avatar it's just finding beautiful landscapes.

When it comes to Na'vi, there are different tribes and cultures for you to discover, they're all unique and interesting in different ways. The game is packed with dozens of cool plants with different utilities, these are mostly the reason why Pandora is such a fun place to explore. You will also meet a bunch of animals, not too many of them, tho. You will be able to ride two species, tho. One is pretty much a horse, and the second one will let you fly. Funnily enough, they bring the flying one first, you get to ride a horse later in the game, which is pretty weird, but it's connected to biomes structure, so I get it.

When it comes to the story, it's pretty... mid? Yeah, it's mid at best. You basically have to explore Pandora to unite the tribes against RDA, along your journey you will meet bland characters (some of them are just comically bad) with even worse dialogue. The game is just like the movies, you don't really experience it for the story. That said, the game had two really strong moments, that caught me off guard. I was actually surprised by the quality of these two segments, if the whole story was like that, It could've been incredible. Sadly, these are just two bright flashes in the fog of boredom. That said, I like the fact, that humans seem really powerful in this game. You see how cruel they are, how much damage they cause, how ahead they are in this conflict. Evil colonialism all over again. I find it quite important, because you play as a frickin' terminator, pretty much soloing the human race. It's just good to feel, that except the main protagonist, humans are insanely threatening, it makes the whole setting believable.

Side activities are uneven.Side quests are mostly boring and not worth doing, some of them are pretty cool, tho, these are marked on your map.Unmarked quests are mostly not worth your time, they feel randomly generated. There is one big side quest, that starts early and lasts for the majority of the game, it ends in a little dungeon-y area near the end of the game, yeah this one was pretty good. There are tribes quests that require specific items with specific rarities. If you have the correct item with better rarity, it doesn't count, you need to bring the worse one. This is literally the most rage inducting part of the game, I decided to ditch these quests, and this was the correct decision. Collectibles are actually fun in this game. There are plants, that let you level up, and they even have special variants with strong abilities. You usually need to do a little parkour, or exploring to find them, I found it quite fun. There are insects you have to follow quickly, it feels like Mirror's Edge runs, also quite fun. I won't bother to explain the rest, but they are all quite different, and quite fun for the most part. Outposts with enemies are good time, you can approach them with different methods, and after clearing them, You clean the pollution, which is just wonderful, I explained it before. Bigger bases are especially engaging, the pollution is heavy in these parts, and it completely changes the mood. They are tough, and they require some planning. Additionally, You can try to raid them much earlier than you should. I raided a max level base early after starting the game, it was painful, it took like 3 hours, but it was extremely satisfying, it felt like going to Hyrule Castle at the beginning of Zelda: BotW.

The gameplay in Avatar: FoP is... alright, I guess. It's pretty unforgiving at first, which is frustrating, but when you level your character a bit, it gets better, much better. The skill tree is really well done in my opinion. You get access to a variety of weapons with different utilities, I actually changed them really often. Towards the end of the game I found the gameplay to be really enjoyable. You can pull off a lot of cool actions, when you master it. The gameplay gets stale after a while, but it's an Ubisoft game, I expected it.You actually feel like playing a Na`vi, which is in my opinion, the most important part, and I think they nailed it. The kit just makes you feel like that wild giant blue jackass, and you get to really play with it. I mentioned before, that the tribes feel pretty helpless against the human race, but at the same time, the game really sells you the fact, that an experienced Na'vi could easily solo an outpost, or two, which is pretty... weird and incredible at the same time. One of the most disappointing things in the game is the fact, that there is no friendly AI. Your main objective through the game, is to unite the tribes to fight RDA, but they didn't program it, so they just show up in cutscenes. It feels cheap, sad and also kind of funny, lmao. You could play as the RDA in the previous Avatar game, but it wouldn't really work in a game like this one, so I don't miss it.

The progression in this game is pretty weird. Leveling is alright, but to get better gear, you have to find correct materials and use crafting. You seek them by using in-game guide, which is pretty fun, but finding the best rarity of these materials can really be a pain in the ass. Alternatively, You can get gear from quests, or from merchants, but crafting is superior. Materials hunting can be fun, but it can be very frustrating, too, it honestly depends what You like. I liked it at first, I absolutely hated it towards the end.

There are some additional small mechanics in the game, like character and mount customization, which is honestly really poor. The only noticable changes are from microtransactions, the unlockable ones barely change anything. F*** microtransactions in single player games. Your gear actually changes a lot, and you can transmog, so at the very least, we have that. I noticed, that your MC will often pause conversations, when he's busy, and will continue later at the moment when he dropped them, so that's pretty cool, I remember that mechanic from GoW.

While I criticized quite a lot of things in this game, I have to admit, that I had a blast playing it. It didn't feel like Far Cry at all, it was more like a mixture of Crysis with Mirror's Edge movement. Exploring Pandora was an unforgettable experience, and the cons didn't spoil it. I ended with over 100 hours of gameplay and the platinum trophy, it left me quite exhausted, tho. If you feel like exploring the most beautiful video game world out there, this is the game to pick up. Additionaly you will get to feel like a̶n̶ ̶A̶m̶e̶r̶i̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶I̶n̶d̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶s̶t̶e̶r̶o̶i̶d̶s̶ a badass giant blue alien, fighting for his precious nature.

I genuinely think, that Avatar: FoP is the perfect adaptation. People went to Cinemas to see Pandora, the story and the rest were less important. This game allows you to truly immerse yourself in this world, just perfectly captured world, and the rest is... pretty alright with some flaws here and there. I'm actually looking forward to explore new biomes in the upcoming DLCs. This game doesn't deserve the hate it gets, just because it's an Ubisandbox, give it a chance, it deserved better. Its price is dropping extremely fast, so there really is no excuse.

To think that Ubi is currently the winner of the prettiest game race is pretty crazy, not gonna lie. Avatar is good, new Prince of Persia is awesome, I'm actually looking forward to the next Assassin's Creed game. Hats off Ubisoft, you are slowly getting things right!

Dang, I thought it's pretty short... Well F***...

7.5/10, but with a ❤️

"The RDA's greed poisoned our world. They took everything from us... from me."

~Wo

I posted a review previously that I wrote hastily and decided to round it out more. This review doesn't contradict the previous in any way - it just expands it.

I think A:FoP is at its most successful when it functions less as a game and more as a temporary refuge. A space where the player can enact forms of resistance that feel completely and structurally out of reach in real life. There’s a reason it feels newly appealing now that they’ve added a third-person mode. Getting to see the Na’vi body in motion restores the game with a sense of presence and embodiment that just wasn’t present, or was at most undermined, with the first-person-only perspective. Can’t help but think third person should have been there from the start. First person allowed for immersion but I think that’s shooting to low for a game like: the point is identification. Seeing yourself as part of the world instead of a pair of hands holding a weapon running through the world.

That fantasy, sadly, is doing some heavy fuckin ideological work. FoP’s escapism is unabashedly anti-capitalist and anti-expansionist in its presentation. The entire narrative stages a monolithic rejection of human industrial growth, inseparable from ecological devastation as it is, as well as a rejection of colonial entitlement. You get to directly intervene against the extraction, the militarization, and the environmental destruction that accompanies these things. In so doing, you’re treated to a feeling of agency that as I mentioned above is not available to us in every day contemporary political life. In FoP, we get to dismantle infrastructure, protect wildlife, and repel occupying forces. Sign me up! But the unease this creates reveals a whole lot: FoP gives us a glimmer of hope because it’s fictional, while real-world efforts toward ecological protection and anti-capitalist resistance are a fuckin joke: marginal, underfunded, and forever on the defensive.

The perspective I have here, one informed by historical materialism, makes the game seductive in one respect and suspect in another. Sure, we’re offered the sensation of resistance without the risk, sacrifice, or the collective organization any kind of resistance would actually need. Violence against the RDA feels cathartic as fuck, but it’s safely contained within a system that can’t really threaten the player’s real conditions of life. FoP casts a hefty critique at capitalism as this kind of external invader, yet it completely sidesteps the fact that it’s more a totalizing system in which you're already embedded. We’re in this shit, y’all. So Pandora becomes a space where opposition is super clean, morally legible, and easily achievable, which, if you didn’t know, ain’t how life works: real-world political struggle is messy as fuck and requires an insane inertia that has a life of its own.

Game design has a whole lot to say about this, reflecting it at damn near every opportunity. It’s amazing, what Massive has managed to create with this game: an absolutely enormous, visually convincing world that feels … woefully underutilized. Pandora sure looks alive but it doesn’t really demand that the player live with it. There are systems here and there that gesture toward immersion, but for me, they fall short of requiring an actual attentiveness, patience, or vulnerability, all traits that I think go a long way toward making a game world feel exceptionally gripping. Combat, too - it feels mechanically satisfying, because you can really fuck up the human invaders, but on a fundamental level, combat actually feels at odds with the Na’vi ethos the game absolutely insists upon. I’ll be the first to say there’s pleasure in overthrowing an occupying force but the frequency and the structure of combat ultimately ends up reducing resistance to an overly familiar power fantasy. I’m left wondering whether a greater emphasis on exploration, survival mechanics, and environmental interdependence might have better aligned gameplay and theme.

But instead, FoP tumbles into the familiar Ubisoft logic of checklists and optimization. “Exploration” mode still presents a pre-digested world. The map has biome labels, named locations, and explicit objectives, which doesn’t differentiate the mode enough from Guided to award it any merit. You’re always told what to do and where to go, which always render dialogue, environment, and subtle cues unnecessary. Conversations become skippable interruptions because the game’s interface already knows what matters. What do we get with that? A persistent fucking rupture in immersion, every goddamn time. Pandora should feel unknowable, demanding care and attention, and instead, you’re constantly, constantly reminded that this is a managed experience. Ubisoft and Massive ask you to revere the world they’ve created, but the design funnels you in the opposite direction.

Then there’s the narrative. FoP points toward an interesting premise, of being a Na’vi raised by colonizers positively yearning to reclaim your stolen identity but it never pushes it far enough to become psychologically or politically unsettling. What a missed opportunity. Just as the films do, the story here feels shallow because they’re presented with a degree of softness that blunts any force it works to build. You can argue there is a degree of moral ambiguity here and there, but it’s now really allowed to fester. You can argue the game acknowledges structural violence, but it’s constantly reframed through individual regret, reconciliation, and choice, undermined entirely by liberal storytelling just as the films are. It all serves to personalize responsibility. Mercer becomes a caricatured embodiment of cruelty, while Alma is framed as a tragic liberal technocrat whose remorse partially redeems her somehow. I think this obscures the systemic nature of colonial violence. Her confession should condemn reformist colonialism itself, but instead functions as a moral salve, as if to imply empire fails due to bad actors rather than because, ya know, extraction and domination are its core logic.

The reliance on defectors and "good" ex-RDA personnel further reinforces this liberal framing - oh, how I disdain liberal storytelling. Resistance depends on former managers and scientists who retain authority after switching sides; "Step aside, Na'vi, you're not needed here, the big boys got this," sidelining the possibility of autonomous, mass Na’vi struggle. It's fitting that your Na'vi companions hang around the hub like dumb curious children rather than being of any utility, which I can't help but see as a metaphor of the cultural attitudes towards them. So what liberation is offered is mediated through insiders, whereas it would have been nice to see it achieved through collective power. Add to that the character plays as a uniquely gifted Sarentu, turning what should be a collective anticolonial movement yet again into a story of exceptional individual agency.

FoP also commits the sin the films do, of idealizing Na’vi society. In so doing, it avoids any serious engagement with internal social tensions or material contradictions. Cultural differences stand in for political economy which comes dangerously close to the "noble savage" trope. Meanwhile, the climactic victory of killing Mercer and driving the RDA from the region offers emotional closure while evading a harder truth: capital reorganizes and returns. Empire is inconvenienced, not dismantled.

These all make the story accessible, sure, but they limit the radical potential - again, what a missed opportunity. That accessibility makes me wonder about audience. The films’ and the game’s collective tonal restraint and reluctance to dwell in genuine despair or contradiction, and the oversimplification of just about everything from narrative to gameplay systems suggests to me a work designed to be broadly palatable, maybe even younger-facing. So maybe my expectations are too high. I guess I would have just expected better of James Cameron given his pre-Avatar work. He’d always been willing to embrace brutality and moral darkness up to that point. So if this an intentional thing, I see it as pointing to a broader cultural hesitation, born from the fear that fully confronting colonialism, ecological collapse, and capitalism’s violence will alienate rather than entertain.

So yeah, FoP is defined by contradiction. Politically sympathetic but mechanically cautious; emotionally resonant but structurally constrained. You get to feel, however briefly, what it might be like to resist Empire and protect a living world, even as the game perpetually rewrites the limits of that resistance through design choices that elevate clarity, control, and comfort above all else. For me, the greatest achievement of FoP is this very discomfort it’s left me with: the realization that the hope it provides feels real precisely because it exists somewhere else… not here, not in this world.

Another Swedish developed game 🇸🇪 From Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. A game I had eyes on for some time. Big sale earlier this year so snatched it!

My overall experience was pretty solid. The world is beautiful! Massive and colorful forests, glowing plants and cool wildlife. The visuals and the world of Pandora is the strength of the game.

The story was good and kept me interested through most of it. You follow your Na’vi character trying to reconnect with the world after being raised by the enemy organisation RDA.

Combat was OK. Not bad, not great. The guns and bow were quite fun to use, the spear I raraly used. After a while it started to feel a bit meh. Clear out an outpost, sabotage something, collect a thing, repeat. Felt good in the start but later on it was just same same.

The world building and atmosphere is where the game shines. Flying around on the Ikran is great — one of the best parts of the game.

Avatar just recently god a 3rd person perspective as an option. When I played it late summer it was only first person perspective. I think that will add another dimension to the game. I haven’t sold it yet so I think I will test it out and see how that feels.

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲➕