An avatar game couldn't escape looking bad. The whole point of James Cameron's sci-fi series is that each new entry represents the then-current pinnacle of CGI and motion capture technology. Avatar was groundbreaking when it hit theaters in 2009, and while The Way of Water was never going to be that big of a technological leap forward, it still made the CG-heavy blockbusters we were getting in the late 2010s and early 2020s look amateurish. by comparison. This is a series where a new entry only comes when its creators can guarantee it will impress.
Avatar Is Built on Pretty
So Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora had to be nice. Pretty is the name of the game. But after sleeping on Massive Entertainment's first licensed game of 2023-2024, I'm shocked at how good it looks. Last year I wrote that Massive's second strike, Star Wars Outlaws, looked shockingly good for a Ubisoft game. After playing a bit of Frontiers of Pandora, I realized that Massive is just good at this. Maybe better than any other studio at making a nice name for a game.
Related
Avatar's Upper Plains is a world-building masterstroke
The Upper Plains are an exceptional contribution to the Avatar lore that feels as evolved as the Pandora we see in the movies.
The game is impressive from the jump, even if it holds back the “step into the world” moment for about an hour. It begins with your character, a young Na'vi, learning in a human school class on Pandora. The building you spend this intro in is sprawling and gray, a mixture of concrete and metal. This might look boring, but as the level escalates to characters escaping the device, it becomes a showcase of the game's graphical prowess. Rays of light stream in from windows, fires break out, puddles of water in dented concrete. The characters (whether human or Na'vi) are incredibly detailed, as are the textures on the objects you pass in your rush to the exit.
Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Nails The Natural World
And that's before you get to the star of the show: the moment you emerge into the jungle. As I began to explore the surface of the planet, I was shocked at how densely packed it turned out to be. Most video game forests and/or jungles don't feel like their real world counterparts. When Ellie and Dinah get lost in the woods outside of Seattle in The Last of Us Part 2, it feels like they're walking down well-marked corridors surrounded by walls of greenery.
In open world games like Breath of the Wild, forests often feel like small areas that are easy to walk in and out of. Unless they're big biomes like the Lost Woods or the jungles of southern Hyrule, they're mostly just chunks of trees that don't feel like they blend together as one thing in the same way that real forests do.
The jungle in Frontiers of Pandora feels like a real jungle. The earth is covered in plants – and in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and species. The brush is dense, but everything moves as you push through. The trees are huge and there are massive twisting vines that you can climb. The water ripples believably. And behind the light is a beautiful blue sky. The colors of all these environmental elements are also heavily saturated, making the world look incredibly vivid.
My only aesthetic problem with the game is its UI, which occasionally veers (like the Avatar logo itself) into “graphic design is my passion” territory in an attempt to create an organic feel.
I won't go into the technical specifics because I'm not Digital Foundry and I don't have the expertise to discuss why the game looks so good on a technical level. All I can tell you is that this generation impressed me very little graphically. Like most gamers, I watched the Sony PS5 Pro pitch and shrugged. But Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora looks as good as any graphical demo that has appeared on either console in the last four years. If I was trying to sell TVs or consoles at Best Buy, I'd have to play it on every display.
Other
Avatar has the best world reveal since Fallout 3
Avatar has a long intro, but it serves to make the first moment you experience Pandora special.
