Open-world games often benefit from putting players in the middle of wars and revolutions, fought across lush and fascinating worlds, where an evil force has taken control of nearly everything and must be pushed back inch by inch. Ubisoft often utilizes this formula for its open-world games, which usually feature huge and gorgeous worlds where you’re fighting a powerful, entrenched military enemy. The harsh but beautiful alien moon of Pandora, the setting of the Avatar films, is a near-perfect fit for the approach.
What’s most interesting about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, though, is that it might give developer Massive Entertainment an opportunity to improve on the Ubisoft open-world formula at a time when the genre is inspiring more than a little fatigue.
We played about two and a half hours of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and at first glance it fits pretty neatly into the established canon of Ubisoft open-world games. You run around completing quests, gathering plants and hunting animals for crafting, and capturing bases to free the areas surrounding them from enemy control. The surface-level aspect feels a lot like the Far Cry series, but with a few RPG-focused tidbits of Massive’s Division games, plus aliens.