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 routes, a vast amount of what I saw was climbable, allowing for all manner of freeform approaches to your destination. And, despite lacking the ‘stickiness’ of Assassin’s Creed’s freerunning, I was able to get anywhere I wanted quickly without any frustrating falls. It’s genuinely impressive.
The demo’s best example of this jungle parkour came in the quest ‘Take Flight’, which directly led to Frontiers of Pandora’s recreation of another Avatar staple; flying atop a pterodactyl-like Ikran. Before I could bond with one of these leathery-winged creatures I had to chase it up a mountain that formed a running challenge. The ascent chained together all the movement techniques I’d learned so far and interspersed stretches of climbing with light puzzles, such as having to find and touch a number of flowers to open a doorway. At the summit I was given my reward: an Ikran to call my own (You can name it a variety of traditional Na’vi names, but I opted for the more comedically mundane ‘Carol’.)
Much like a horse in Assassin’s Creed, your Ikran can be summoned at any time. Unlike a horse in Assassin’s Creed, you can do this while falling from a mountain peak. This is proper movie fantasy fulfilment; soaring through the skies, you’re able to weave between floating sky islands, nosedive along cliff edges, and fly into the sunset. Despite all that, I’m not quite as sold on travelling via Ikran as I am on the on-foot movement. It feels less dynamic and oddly sluggish compared to the more nimble ground systems, and flight controls are a touch awkward. I did enjoy performing explosive fly-bys against RDA Samsons, though – the enemy human helicopters that poison Pandora’s skies.
As in the films, invading humans are the enemy in Frontiers of Pandora. When it comes to taking them out, there are two broad options: traditional Na’vi weaponry or modern RDA guns. They offer two different approaches; the silent Na’vi bows are best suited to stealth infiltrations while the loud human guns are for when all hell breaks loose. Not that the latter happened much; at least in this demo, the enemy AI was so braindead they barely reacted to allies dying right next to them. Combined with simplistic encounter design, most combat situations proved trivially easy.
The humans ideally need to be smarter because they are squishy and thus can’t take much punishment, be that from your arrows or a swing from your fist (you are a nine-foot-tall cat person, after all). More competent bad guys will provide Avatar with a much-needed boost in challenge. Thankfully many of the humans are smart in a different way: they stomp around in protective mech suits. These are harder to destroy, but using your ‘Na’Vi sense’ will highlight a mech’s weak points such as the pilot, exhaust vents, or missile pods. This reminded me a lot of Guerilla’s Horizon games in which you scan mechanical beasts for their weak points and blast them off with arrows. And, just like in Horizon, you can craft different arrow varieties straight from the weapon wheel, refilling your quiver with suitable ammo on the fly. It feels a bit on the nose for Avatar to pilfer from the other Native American-inspired sci-fi with bows and mechs, but I can’t deny that this was the more satisfying side of the otherwise underwhelming combat.
While I found humans dotted about the Pandoran wilds, my main encounter with them came at one of their industrial bases. This was a welcome contrast to the natural world; all sharply angled steel corridors, bulkhead doors, and concrete floors. Out in the jungle home territory of the Na’Vi I rarely felt in danger, but within the foreign, claustrophobic walls of this RDA compound my senses were constantly on edge. Crates, hidden vents, and overhead walkways provided simple stealth routes to avoid the guard patrols and stomping mechs, which posed more significant opposition here thanks to their increased numbers.
My objective here was to sabotage several systems in an effort to bring RDA drilling operations to a halt. Doing so was fairly simple – nothing more complicated than pulling levers or dabbling in a bit of Watch Dogs-ish hacking – and so the real challenge was slinking between patrol gaps to do my work unseen. This was, more than anything in the demo, the most Far Cry-feeling element – a classic outpost takedown. But, thanks to that aforementioned contrast to the natural world, it didn’t feel as tired as you might expect.
This sort of traditional Far Cry work was a rarity, though. If the demo’s two hours are representative of Avatar as a whole, then a significant portion of your time will be spent doing more peaceful activities. The films’ natural world focus is represented here by an increased hunter-gatherer approach compared to Ubisoft’s other games. You need to frequently eat to ensure your health bar regenerates, so picking fruits and preparing meals with them is more central to the experience. Seemingly as a result of that, harvesting isn’t a single button-tap job; you must instead take hold of the fruit and rotate the analogue stick to find the right angle to pull from, similar to a lockpicking minigame. You can also hunt, but animals must be honourably killed with a bow; shooting Pandora’s wildlife with human bullets will spoil the meat.
Among the side activities on offer were animals tagged by RDA darts, which had to be slowly approached and soothed before the needle was plucked out. This was all achieved by simply holding down one button and so didn’t offer all that much challenge, but I appreciate the thematic dedication to Avatar’s nature-loving soul. Similarly, I also found a huge rhino-like creature trapped in an RDA cage, and all it took was a few arrows to kill its captors and set it free. Hopefully the humans will put up better resistance in the full game, as otherwise these activities risk becoming box-ticking exercises.
The other issue that I hope Massive will address before release is signposting. Pandora is a densely detailed world - an incredibly beautiful place that constantly reacts to your presence, decorated with a thousand things to see at any given time. That made finding very specific things something of a needle in a haystack situation – allied Na’vi characters often blended into the blue-hued environments, and one quest had me searching high and low for an item I had no way of recognising in the first place. Just a little bit more UI guidance in these situations would be appreciated.
Structurally, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is going to be instantly recognisable to anyone who has played a Far Cry game in the last decade. But with its jungle parkour systems, flying mount, and increased focus on harmony with the natural world, it is at the very least making some notable changes to the formula. This certainly helps anchor it in the world of Avatar, but it remains to be seen if these additions will be meaningful enough to make the entire experience feel fresh. But, as someone who has grown very tired of this particular approach, I was happy to find that I left the demo session curious to see more of what lies among the trees of Pandora’s frontiers.
Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Features Editor.
