Frontiers of Pandora reviews are mixed – WGB, Home of AWESOME Reviews

As 2023 winds down there aren’t a lot of big games left, except for Ubisoft’s new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora which is, of course, based on James Cameron’s two Avatar movies, the latest of which released earlier this year. Let’s take a look at the reviews for Ubisoft’s latest game and see if its worth buying.

Frontiers of Pandora has you playing as an unnamed Na’vi raised by humans who battle against the invading forces of the RDA which seek to strip the place of its valuable resources. It takes the form of an open-world shooter, much like the Far Cry games, emphasising using the Na’vi size and speed to move around the environment quickly. It’s available on Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5 and PC.

So far, the reception has been quite mixed. On Metacritic the game holds an aggregated score of 74, putting it ahead of Opencritic’s aggregated score of 69. Nice. For comparison, Ubisoft’s last game was Assassin’s Creed Mirage which sits at a score of 76 on Opencritic.

You can pick up Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora on Amazon right now.

On the higher end we have Steven Mills of Destructoid who gave it an impressive 9 out of 10. He wraps up his review by writing:  “Seeing Pandora is one thing, but being able to scale its massive treetops, soar high above its floating mountains on an Ikran, and traverse its wide open plains on the back of a Direhorse is really something special. This is the best version of Avatar yet. “

Gamespot was also fairly pleased with the game. In his review, Phil Hornshaw gave it an 8 out of 10. “Pandora is often magnificent, and I stopped repeatedly just to look around and take it in.” Phil says. “Diverting from a goal to gather up some armor bark and bow string or blow up an industrial facility were fun detours and felt like an important part of existence there. Best of all, I never felt like an open-world trashman, dumping junk on the way to the next map marker. Instead, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora made me feel like I was adventuring in a place worth exploring, and I’m eager to go back.”

Moving toward the lower end of the spectrum we have Andrew Stretch of TechRaptor who gave it a piddling 5 out of 10. Here what he had to say: “With a story that follows predictable beats, mechanics that provide zero gameplay benefit, and murky visuals, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora delivers an extremely underwhelming experience. PC players be warned of many technical issues.”

Delving into those issues he mentioned, even on his relatively solid gaming rig the game apparently had serious stuttering. Even turning everything to low didn’t solve the problem, and Andrew said that more than once,  “the entire game locked up for 10+ seconds only to flicker back to life on a game over screen.”

Shack News wasn’t singing the game’s praises either. Lucas White handled reviewing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and slapped it with a 5 out of 10 as well. Here’s how he sums it up: “The problem is that other, similar games have done this dance with more satisfying results. Take the alien exoticism away and you’ve got the “Ubisoft checklist game” that doesn’t even do that thing as well as the last several of those. Even in the licensed game space, titles like Mad Max are practically identical in a framework sense, but so much more fun to engage with.”

Kudos to Lucas for mentioning the Mad Max game from 2015, though. That game is an often overlooked banger.

Swinging back up to the middle of the spectrum, we have the ever-talented Tristan Ogilvie penning IGN’s review. Tristan gave it a 7 out of 10 in a review which basically described it as being a solid open-world game that didn’t anything surprise: “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora features a stunning alien world to explore, but doesn’t contain as many genuine surprises as other modern open-worlds.”

So, to sum up the consensus thus far, it seems Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a decent open-world game that sticks pretty close to the standard Ubisoft template. Most people seem to agree that it looks beautiful and is a wonderful recreation and expansion of the world that was created in the movies, and that the gameplay is quite fun. To be honest, that sounds pretty good to me. It might be worth a punt if you can find it cheap or have already burned through all the big games of 2023, although that list is insanely deep.