Review Hacksaw 2/5 · Dec 14, 2025
Rewritten: Blue Capitalism with Better Vibes
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 …
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.















