I have waited 15 years for this! | Avatar frontier of Pandora

Avatar has given me the feeling of something I've wanted for 15 years but how has Ubisoft done it how has Ubisoft taken a formula that's been done time and time again but this time it makes me giddy Avatar doesn't do anything different than any other Ubisoft game in the last 10 years it's got perks it's got skill progression it's got gear it's got It's got an overarching story that's good enough so why am I having so much fun in Avatar why do I feel so much more attached to this game than games in any other Ubisoft catalog and I do think it's because it pulls on the heartstrings that was set by a movie back in 2009 the opening of the game is written in a way that makes sense inside of that world it makes it feel grounded and like it actually belongs and that's something that's not easy to get right and quad AOG games do miss the mark when they create something in an already established universe so right off the bat I felt like I belonged with the background information I have from the movies I understood where I was in this world and it set the road map for me to have a journey like Jake suly did in the original Avatar film it set the groundwork for a character that needs to learn it set the groundwork for me to learn to fulfill a fantasy that the movie set 15 years ago and 15 years years ago we got a movie that was visually striking a world of bioluminescent and scale of fora that was just unmatched and this game nails that perspective it feels like Pandora that look that unique style of trees that unique style of creatures and audible sounds as you walk through Pandora straight from the let go you feel like you are there and it's so important with a franchise like Avatar to feel like you are there to capture that same feeling as the movies did if you stumble at this building block the rest of the game will struggle to feel as impactful as it should do graphically this game is outstanding having landmarks that look visually similar enough that I can say I feel like I've been here I feel like I'm walking in the footsteps of the navi but it's not all perfect even though it looks like Pandora sometimes it doesn't feel like Pandora sometimes you will be running along a cliff Edge wanting to scale it wanting to jump from tree to tree to tree but the game stopping you from performing those actions the trees being slightly too far apart or they're not being enough access along a cliff Edge navvi feels like you should be living in the Treetops Navi feels like you should be hurling yourself from location to location never touching the floor a bit like Assassin's Creed running across a rooftop so the moment you are running across a rivered it loses some of its charm and sometimes can make you feel frustrated that you have to be navigating your way around areas instead of really climbing over them or even going through them and as you get further into the game it starts to make more and more sense the reason for this is that a real emphasis early on in the game is made on flying of taking hold and making a bond with your rran and the environmental Journey it takes you on as you achieve your bond with your rran is something that really felt special as an avatar fan and from that moment onwards traversal wasn't a problem as you flew through the canopies of trees and and along the tops of rivers at that point you felt like you were in Pandora you feel like you are na'vi with your itran riding through the sky Unstoppable without bounds but up to that point it does feel restrictive in places and that could be on purpose in the same way as Jake suly wandering aimlessly through the forest like a dumb human you have to learn your way through the forest you have to learn your environments achieving your bond with your itran gives you that sense of really becoming one with Pandora it felt like a stepping stone from being this person who was a visitor to being a person who belonged in this world and starting that Journey To Belong starts with character creation Which comp compared to other systems out there is a little bit lacking hair eyes skin colors there doesn't seem to be enough there to really tickle the taste buds it's just a start of what could potentially be there as you work your way through the game you do unlock more haircuts and things like this to really give yourself an identity as you go through this journey but from a baseline it's pretty rudimentary as a character creation system goes I've been playing the game on Explorer mode which is a mode in most Ubisoft titles where they remove map markers and say we're going to try and explain to you where it is northeast of said location by the second river Ben along the river temps that kind of thing and then you can use the in-game map and your knowledge of the world to find the locations instead of just following a map marker this is one of my favorite ways of experiencing games looking finding traversing worlds to find locations instead of just be given the answer straight off the bat Ghost Recon breakpoint is probably the best example of this minus the last two Assassin's Creed games which I haven't experienced yet a system like this should really amplify your experience with Avatar but it is let down by its map design where the map isn't that precise as something like Ghost Recon breakpoint the stylistic aspect of the map combined with the sometimes iffy directions the game gives you really can have you wondering where locations are and have you lost in the world the way this could be resolved is by making the map slightly more detailed and the explanations point out locations of areas in the world instead of just saying Northeast of this location when what you really mean is by the cliff Edge Northeast of this location it adds a little bit to it and gives you a little bit more direction to pinpoint locations on the map in most games these days they give you a way of progressing your character of feeding that drive to improve and increase your level of power in the game in Avatar this comes hand inand with a narrative aspect as well as a personal aspect of growth and learning a large part of of Avatar's narrative is around learning from other people's experiences sometimes your way of doing things is not the best way of doing things sometimes your way of doing things doesn't fit into other people's cultures and other people's way of life and it's about learning and gaining Knowledge from them I feel like the perk system and Avatar really solidifies that in this world it's no different from most other games I have played but the way that your character starts out by killing animals and it not being done in the navi way to your ability to Traverse the world it almost feels childlike as you explore the world you will learn the correct way of picking plants you will learn the correct way of hunting animals and as you increase your skills via your perks it enhances these abilities weak spot damag is increased other things like that there's nothing in the perk pool that is exceptional design or something another game has never done before what it does though is it links the perks to the way the navi would treat Pandora one of the things I found very quickly and that was frustrating when I started the game was I was trying to make merciful kills I was trying to kill animals in the way the navi would in the films one shotting them hitting specific points on the body but the game wasn't really portraying that aspect of Avatar but as I worked my way through some skills and worked my way through the story from the skill trees I got aspects that enhance weak spot damage increased my ability to see weak spots on enemies and that led to me being able to one shot enemies when shot in the correct locations that started to enhance my feeling of being RV but it was still missing a point it was still missing an aspect of Avatar where when I kill an enemy when I kill an animal and Navi would pray a navi would thank AA and it was missing that but as I progress through the story and in fact showed off some of my skills to the local inhabitants of Pandora they then said hold on a minute yeah you could shoot correctly but you need to thank Awan and after that point in the game my character would then pre after every kill he would do the hand gestures now over a course of 10 15 kills this would start getting quite cumbersome having to do a little prayer after every single hunt would be irritating from a gameplay aspect so Ubisoft did something quite clever here the first couple of kills would do the full speech after the first kill the game would then narrow that speech down and just do a couple of lines from the speech and after a few more kills he would just do the hand gestures lowering the amount of time it took to harvest to kill but still giving you that aspect of thanking AA being part of that environmentally LED storytelling of you becoming Navi it really solidified to me what this game was aiming for with its perk systems with its traversal systems with its Gathering systems everything in the game is focused on you learning learning the correct way of doing things learning the navi way of doing things this even leads into slightly other aspects of exploration and the perk system where there are only specific perks can pick up from connecting with awar there are locations around the map that will give you specific perks less full damage the ability to double jump so you can then climb through trees better and it was that ability to explore the world and then linking myself to AA which would give me knowledge to then become more Navi that I felt a real connection to this world and the growth of my character as well as this as exploration goes there are even more points on the map that reward you with perk points that you can then put into your character but the adaptation of your character doesn't stop there gear comes hand in hand with how you want to play the game you can do the navi purely focused stuff like I'm doing going Bose only Navi weapons only having Navi gear on focusing on weak spots and stealth like a navi would but some people might not want to play like that they want to be a little bit more human in the way they play so there is also a focus on human weaponry and using that as well and you can really spec out your character's gear and perks to really focus on how you want to play but once again in this game it goes one step further where there's a Cosmetic System in the game not anything you have to throw money in but just an aspect of if you collect a piece of gear you unlock the Cosmetic part of that gear being able to say I want my character to look like this and that not affecting the stats of your character is something I love I want to play out this visual aspect of my character to be who I want them to be and having stats not affect the visual aspect is just brilliant and in 20124 if your game's not doing it you really have missed the mark you can see that in something like cyberp punk where they added that into the game after the fact up to this point we've been really focused on your character development and your character grow growth how systems interact with each other to make you feel like you're really developing but that's not the only part of the game that develops one of my favorite things in games is the ability to change the world and Avatar gives me the real sense of that being able to be impactful on my environment around the world there are RDA bases these bases are pumping large amounts of pollution into the world and as you Traverse the world you can hear these bases you can see these bases the impact they're having on the world you could be walking through some Lush Greenland forests and as you start to see things dying and decaying the environment changes dependent on these bases and you can walk through a river and it be crystal clear and suddenly it starts to get murky dirty the environmental storytelling here adds the aspect of the game Pandora shouldn't look like this I need to fix it I need to help Pandora and taking out these bases rejuvenates the world it makes things look green and Lush but that's not the only thing being able to take over bases is one thing but having that be a meaningful change in the environment is not so easy in video games and I feel like they really nailed something here I can take out an RDA base and then the life around the RDA base regrows very very quickly in fact almost instantly and I was like oh that's really cool but that happened very fast a plant wouldn't really grow that quickly in real life it wasn't until I Revisited one of these locations I saw the true impact of my actions in the environment I saw this base be completely overgrown I saw mechs that I had defeated overgrown with life and I thought wow that made me feel like it actually made an impact in this world instead of it just being a gameplay thing I love the fact that my actions felt meaningful in this world World it felt like I was actually contributing instead of number go up or pollution decrease it felt like I was actually having an environmental impact and I wanted to start exploring some of the bigger bases I had taken over to see the changes they would make on the environment all these systems and all this exploration is topped off with a bow and that bow is music the music of Avatar has a signature to it and it is replicated beautifully here when exploring the floating islands the music hits hard and impactful and fills you with that emotion you know the type of Journey the game is leading you on but the music adds that emotional aspect to it that really takes over your body and as good as 90% of all these things are it does fall down in a few places having such an incredible resource like the Avatar movies can be a blessing and a curse in the Avatar movies there there's a specific scene where Jake suly is learning to become na'vi and he falls from a treetop and hits branches on his way down that is replicated in this game but it's replicated poorly because of the movies you know what it's meant to look like you know what the animations and the audio is meant to feel like because that aspect is cheaply remade in the game it doesn't feel right and it takes you out of the game a little bit you are left jumping off a cliff and hitting the branches on the way down and feeling that's not what that's me to look like so the incredible resource of such a visual representation like the films can be a double-edged sword where if you don't perfectly replicate what is in the films it will take you out of the experience but most of this stuff they do get right the game then wraps up all these systems with a crafting and cooking system being able to affect your sta hats depending on what you've eaten recently the Gathering system linking in with a quality of the ingredients you're Gathering From fine to Exquisite and Beyond and having these Exquisite items then actually affect the things you're cooking and crafting is a really nice aspect it means you're not just learning how to pick items how to gather items throughout the world arbitrarily the aspect of learning to become Navi actually affects the gear you're wearing and the food you're cooking and it all comes together in a Witcher likee style experience I'm playing on the hardest difficulty and what I have found myself doing now and then is looking at a scenario stealthily sneaking around a base and picking targets and thinking right I want to eat some stealth food here or I want to eat some weak spot damage food here and actually picking the food I'm eating to really fit in with the scenario I am about to commence the systems creating this feeling of Avatar everything I've said so far has been about Pandora has been about Avatar has been about my love of a franchise the way this game makes me feel is because of my love for that franchise and if I didn't have the love for the franchise that I do I don't think I would have connected with this game in that meaningful way this is an avatar game made for Avatar fans and quite frankly if you're not an avatar fan you will see these systems as duplicates of other Ubisoft games and potentially even weak implementations of these games the modding of guns isn't as good as breako and the parkour isn't as good as Assassin's Creed the narrative isn't as good as something like Far Cry 3 so I think in conclusion my thoughts are this I love this game I think this game is brilliant but I think this because I'm an avatar fan and if you're not an avatar fan this might be from a great experience to a good experience or an okay experience this game is carried by the environments and world that James Cameron has built not that it has built I fly around on my itran full of joy and excitement because I'm replicating something from a movie not because it's the best flying in any game ever the combat isn't as good as a Far Cry game its skills and perks are not as vast as Assassin's Creed so even though they may have nailed the Avatar part of the title I don't know if they've nailed the video game part of the title and I think it stands as a testament to say that Ubisoft make okay games Ubisoft games are good enough but they're not excellent they're not Exquisite and that is Avatar if you're an avatar fan you will adore this game you will adore the experiences and reliving the aspects that you've seen on the big screen but you won't necessarily be engaged with a system as well as something like cyber Punk or Skyrim you won't adore the game for the game you will adore the game for the franchise

Channel: IAMWILL

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Keywords: avatar gameplay, frontiers of pandora gameplay, avatar frontiers of pandora review, Steam, avatar ubisoft, ubisoft, singleplayer, open world, review, pc, game, iamwill, pc gaming, performance, new steam games 2024

Id: r0Z-LIv75BA

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2024