Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Ubisoft's final big release of 2023, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, looks, feels and plays pretty much identically to every open world Ubisoft adventure you may or may not have played over the past decade. It's most reminiscent of Far Cry Primal in its moment-to-moment gameplay, with a focus on gathering and making use of nature to heal, refill ammo and take the fight to your foes, but there's plenty more you'll recognise from other Ubi joints along the way.

Set in a properly jaw-dropping recreation of Pandora, this standalone Avatar adventure sees you play as a Na'vi orphan who's been raised by the RDA (those nasty humans) and as a result you've lost touch with many of your traditions and fallen out of the ways of your people. Oh, and you're a little rusty when it comes to combat, so you'll need to work through a bunch of skill trees as you rediscover your swagger across a roughly 15-hour long campaign.

Yes, 15 hours, and only around about 25 if you decide to 100% the thing. This is fairly small, dare we even say manageable for a Ubisoft open world effort in modern times, and it's honestly one of this game's biggest plus points. This isn't some enormous, time-consuming commitment like so many of your Far Crys, Assassin's Creeds and so on, it's a game you can actually start in the knowledge it can be beaten without having to forgo your normal sleeping patterns.

It's also a very good thing because, really, besides some okay parkouring around trees and a bit of flying around on your Ikran, this is a rather timid affair overall, a gentle open world game that goes easy, doesn't hit you with any big surprises or difficulty spikes and is perhaps best considered as something younger players can jump into to learn the basic ropes of the genre.

Combat, while fine when you're skulking around on the ground and have time to plan a little, is a farce once you take to the skies - big dumb helicopters are not fun to fight against - and there's just no real strategy to anything once the stealth window has been shut. Taking on RDA mechs, you'll want to use your Na'vi vision to highlight big glowing weak points then assault to get the upper hand, and humans on foot can be disposed of with a single shot, but those same mechs can be a frustration when they don't go down as expected from a stealth shot, with enemies preferring to barrel into you rather than using any battlefield tactics.

The vast majority of the action in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora takes place in great big refineries and enemy complexes that are polluting Pandora and must be taken out in the same manner as the encampments or forts in the Far Cry and Assassin's Creed franchises. You know the drill, scan the area, tag enemies, take out any sniping guards, manoeuvre through the territory and hit a few switches to shut down the industrial pillaging of your homeland, then head back to your nearest Na'vi base to further the story along.

And it's chiefly in this story that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora comes up most lacking. The gameplay here might be the same old same old for the most part - generic but fairly enjoyable - but with two movies' worth of lore to fall back on, with such a solid foundation on which to build, Ubisoft has only managed to come up with a rather tired effort where it could have delivered something a bit more special. We are 100% onboard with its environmental message, and it gets the job done overall, but there's just no real excitement or anything memorable across the game's running time. With no big bosses to take on or surprises down the road a little, it's all a bit bland and safe on the gameplay front at the same time as being one of the best-looking things we've reviewed this year.

Side-missions and interactions with NPCs are a letdown too, with basic fetch quests and stilted cutscenes full of tired chatter as you engage with other Na'vi to help them with various errands. There's little to no emergent gameplay either, which is a surprise given the focus on utilising your environment. Local wildlife, useful for resources when killed with a clean strike so the meat ain't spoiled, don't seem interested in scraps, so they sort of just mill about, and enemies never gave us the sort of fight that led to unexpected chases or battles through the jungle.

We also reckon the RPG-lite gear system, the assortment of clothing and clothing mods you'll find especially, just feels unnecessary. Na'vi outfits just don't have the right vibe to make gathering new outfits a compelling reward here - the character creation isn't very flexible either - and so it's just shoe-horned in for no good reason and makes for a loot system that feels underwhelming.

On the performance side of things, as we've mentioned already, this is a proper stunner in terms of its visuals, and for the most part it runs really well too. However, you will encounter stutters here and there, especially when flying around on your Ikran or engaging a bunch of tedious helicopters, so things aren't completely without issue, even on Series X.

If you're a big Far Cry fan, or just enjoy the core gameplay loop of these sorts of Ubisoft open world efforts, then you'll definitely find enough here to enjoy in an easy-breezy sort of way. The combat is fine, it gets a little better as you unlock more skills, the same can be said of a decent parkour system that can occasionally - especially when zipping about on vines - feel very satisfying. There's definitely a reasonable enough 20 hours of fun to be had here for stans of the genre and plenty of opportunity for big Avatar fans to roleplay being a Na'vi, using your environs to survive, engaging the humans on your terms and slowly cleaning your planet of the RDA's filth.

However, it's all very safe, all very by the Ubi playbook and it feels, in the end, like a bit of a missed opportunity. From a technical perspective Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora knocks it out of the park for the most part but, with such rich lore to extract an adventure from, it really feels like we could have had a killer game on our hands if the story had just delivered a little more in the way of shocks, surprises and challenges. Kids should lap it up, this is a strong first open world effort for younger gamers, so it definitely earns a recommendation from us, but anyone else may be better served trying something with a bit more bite.