Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review

Meh

by BloodScorchedSun

This game looks great and it uses the flora and fauna of the Avatar world to great effect. There are aspects of this game that are great and it's blend of modern Farcry and Primal work really good. The issue, as is the case with most Ubisoft games, is that it gets stale pretty quick and it is far too bloated. There is so much unnecessary filler in this game. On top of that the one thing this game could've used was a tower or two to clear the fog of war but of course there are none. After almost 80 hours in the game I still had fairly large batches of the map covered because you apparently barely clear any as you traverse. The gameplay itself is mostly fine, I found it to be pretty slow in your movement even when on a mount. You'd think while flying on an Ikran that you wouldn't feel like you are going 5 mph. Thankfully there is a good fast travel system that lets you get around quick. My biggest complaint about the game is the gear system. For whatever reason they decided all of their games need loot with stats and now they decided to have craftable gear. There are resources and gathering that have RNG relating not only to its location, time of day and weather conditions but also on how you grab it. This just makes it a chore to craft the best gear you can and this isn't optional. You need a specific level of gear for certain missions, how it dictates this gear is beyond me because I frequently had higher damage weapons that would bring down my gear score if equipped. This leads to you being potentially softlocked if you don't have the correct level of gear. You can attempt any missions at any level but most of the time that will lead to you being one shotted if you are so far under the recommended level. In the Skybreaker DLC I also ran into a few bugs several time including long load times that seemed to skip over cutscenses for some reason. I'm not sure if this was related to the third person view patch they put out or not. Lastly, the trophies suck. There are a lot relating to the story and other random things you'll get along the way. Then you have some that have you do a few sidequest things, others that will have you complete the entire side quest line and one that has you maxing out all the donations which was extremely tedious. I have no idea where they come up with some of these as opposed to some better ones.