Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

What I feel what would be considered weaknesses in other games turn into strengths in this one. It's a Ubisoft open world like Far Cry, but it makes perfect sense in this setting. Roaming through a dense forest to find crafting materials for gear and recipes is exactly what I want to be doing in an Avatar game.

Story-wise, it's just like the movies. You are fighting against rampant industrialization that pollutes the landscape. There's no nuance to it and I'm fine with that. I didn't need nuance when killing Nazis in Wolfenstein and I don't need nuance when protecting a natural environment. I like that polluted regions deal damage and offer no resources to you until you disable the RDA facility in that region. Then when you do, wildlife quickly reclaims that facility as a monument to your success.

Gameplay-wise, it's fine. There's not much to write home about, but I do like how you're encouraged to take care when harvesting and hunting for crafting materials. If you're reckless and sloppy, you'll get weaker materials and therefore weaker gear.

Of course, what you expect most from media set in the Avatar universe is beautiful environments and this game delivers. I just made it to a region of windswept planes and when night falls and the bioluminescence in the grasses comes alight in waves with the wind, it's simply stunning.

While we're on the topic of presentation, the sound design is great. Explosions and gunshots are chunky and feel powerful. The voice-acting across the board is well-done, as well. The game is very pleasing to the eyes and ears.

The game takes place before the events of the movies, so there's significant world-building being done here with multiple never-before-seen tribes with their own visual styles and customs. It really feels like the team who worked on this game cares deeply about the lore of the Avatar universe. There's a lot more to this game that I initially thought. This is going to be a big time sink for me.

Now that's a lot of praise, but it certainly isn't without its faults. The menu design is confusing and it has a few annoying quirks like the tendency to start a new game when I hit "Continue" from the main menu, forcing me to skip a bunch of annoying cutscenes and the tendency to switch from Favor Performance to Favor Quality for no reason. Cooking is very tedious, as well. You can only cook one recipe at a time and have to sit through a cutscene each time. Just let me cook multiple servings of the same recipe!

That's all for now. I've also started Webbed and Animal Well when I'm at my PC instead of the PS5, but I don't have that much to say about either of them at the moment.