Avatar: Frontiers of Pandorafirst clicked for me when things got grim.
The RDA are the villains in this world, and they’re us: they’re the humans.
The grass was gone.
The rocks were black with oil and smoke.
It was grim and abhorrent and I loved it.
But they’re all variations on a theme, the theme being the trashing of paradise.
In truth, though, these camps always made me delighted.
But in these RDA territory sequences, I truly felt the fiction of it all.
Inside the RDA’s installations there would be heavily armed soldiers and patrol routes and big stompy mechs.
You get the gist.
You often turn the same wheels and pull the same switches as you navigate the same mechs.
But firstly: that’s the RDA isn’t it?
How fit for the repetitive nature of open-world game design are these guys?
Secondly: I never tired of this because the fiction really came alive in these moments.
And things always went wrong.
That’s another part of the glory of these sequences.
Later, they become more overwhelming: things you are lodged deep inside, working your way through.
But still, that asymmetry.
Are these the best parts of the game?
They’re certainly my favourite.
But they’re not alone by any means.
Hardly the most auspicious of introductions.
But Frontiers of Pandora won me over.
And then, throughout all the regular Ubi stuff, you get these memorable moments scattered around.
Yes, up-front: a lot of Ubi stuff.
(Those floating islands can’t help but bring back memories ofGrow Home, incidentally.
I spent a long time swooping between them and landing even when I wasn’t on missions.)
But these moments of singular pleasure!
You’re told Ikran can be flighty, so I was a bit nervous.
It’s level design, but it’s also this glorious bit of amping up.
And yes, Ikrans are fun, it turns out.
I raced under arches that may have been trees or may have been the ancient ribcage of something massive.
So yes, it’s a massive game, and slightly exhaustingly so in places.
There’s a lot of formula and a fair amount of repetition.
The further you go, the more the game grows perhaps too hectic for its own good.
But there are moments that feel special, too, and moments I’ll remember.
And that’s the thing I’ve been pondering over the last few days.
Two things, actually.
Firstly, why does this fiction that I’m not particularly bothered about work so well here?
And why does Cameron’s vision make so much sense nestled inside Ubisoft’s standard way of doing things?
I think the answer to both questions is that there is a surprising harmony at work.
He makes films that are heartfelt but also deeply calculated.
Doesn’t that sound like a lot of Ubisoft’s stuff?
Tentative, glossy-eyed, a total believer.
Maybe that’s even seen in the two worlds of Frontiers of Pandora.
Two worlds come together, at least two worlds.
And, despite the fiction, they connect pretty neatly.
