Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora preview - A great game for your dad

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has positioned itself quite nicely in this hellish year for video game releases. While Baldur's Gate 3 is digging up trees, the Dead Space Remake is dumping oil in the water and Resident Evil 4 is pouring concrete on flowers, Avatar is perched over in December away from the madness. As such, it's not unreasonable to look at it as a nice year-ender. A Christmas present for a loved one, or an avenue for fun over the holidays. But how well does it actually play?

I was given a glimpse at that answer, courtesy of Ubisoft who provided a two-hour preview window earlier this month. Dropped onto Pandora early in the story with the unmistakable lush greenery ahead of me, I got to work exploring the game.

The primary thought walking into and out of the preview was whether Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was essentially a Far Cry game with a blue coat of paint. It kind of is! You can certainly feel the bones of a Far Cry game in there. The first-person action is punchy, but simple. There's room to experiment and flex your style, but not too much. It's an incredibly easy game to get into - which makes sense! If you're making an Avatar game you want Avatar fans to jump into it. This means that Avatar is an unoffensive product, for good and ill.

Now, I wouldn't degrade the Avatar-ness of the game a 'coat of paint'. The game seeps reverence for the IP in a way that'll make folks who dig the films giddy. Dashing through the world and punching a solder 20 feet is wildly fun, flying around on a Toruk, touching those orange plants that pop and retract upon touch. It's incredibly tempting to lean back and fall into the world Massive Entertainment has made here. Even if I'm not the biggest Avatar or Ubisoft fan in the world, it's clear the game was made by talented people who care about getting the Avatar feel right.

Here's the thing though. If you're a fan of Avatar you're already probably keen to try the game out, and you should! This is a game practically made in a lab for you to enjoy. If you want to shoot arrows and help out wounded animals, everything you want appears to be here. However if you're bored to death of gathering resources and crafting, skill trees, and taking over enemy camps across the map, the game has that in spades. If you hate pizza and take a bite out of a slice, it doesn't really matter how great that slice is. As good as the send up to the IP is, it won't distract from genre fatigue if it's latched onto you.

That's not to say there's not a unique brand of joy here. I do think flying the Toruk is pretty fun, if a touch slow. I like how the game lets you jump off and re-mount at will, even in the air. This resulted in a 10-minute window where I tried sniping enemies from mid-air with my bow without crashing into the floor. When the game hits its stride, it's a damn good theme park that might even make James Cameron happy.

The game is gorgeous too, although I was playing it on a giga-powerful Ubisoft PC so I obviously can't comment on how this will translate to lower-performance rigs or console versions. There was genuinely a moment when I was playing through a main story mission - one which attempts and succeeds at replicating the movie moment where Jake gets his own flying companion - where I stopped and just looked around. I shamefully did the E3 demo thing. It's a habit I've gained in old age, looking out at in-game vistas when they present themselves. This game is not shy at showing off Pandora whenever able.

There is one part of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora that I'm not a huge fan of. It's a full-price game selling for just under £70, but has an in-game store full of cosmetics and various armour bits you can slap on your character. It's just unnecessary. In a mostly single player game why are you selling this junk, with arbitrary in-game currency too? If you're fine with this sort of addition or comfortable in your capacity to ignore the stink of it that's fine.

All in all Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is...fine? I don't mean that in a harsh way, it's a perfectly palatable product for the average person. That's kind of the point, I think. It's a game with no sharp edges that would cause someone to walk away. Now, in doing so does it sacrifice a degree of interest or mystique you could find in a more specialised FPS? I think so. Buy it for your dad, or your brother with a short back and sides haircut. It's a game for Facebook Messenger users, those who like milk and one sugar with their tea, and dogs called Max. Vanilla ice cream in a year packed with colourful flavours, for those with a taste for simple pleasures.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora releases on December 7 on PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC. Avatar fans should mark their calendars.