Masynn Acheson reporter
“Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” gets a solid 5/5-star rating for just how gorgeous the graphics are. The price is pretty high, but for all you can get with the base game plus the opportunity for expansion is worth it. Not to mention, the playable map area is massive, there is a whole range of different NPCs to meet, a ton of animals to learn about, and the forest at night is a view to die for.
The graphics and experiences are what drew a lot of people in, and the rest were looking for an opportunity to experience the difference in fighting another human versus a nearly 10ft tall blue alien. The fighting style is different from playing games with a human as the point of view, and the skills you can learn to survive in the forest are flavored really well for the culture and species.
The plot is all in line with the lore already established by the first two movies. I have been a die-hard fan of the world of Pandora since I first saw the movie and bought the game as soon as I could. There is hope that the video game will come into play during the movies as well, given how well the game has stuck to the timeline and story of the movies.
Just like in the movie, a Na’vi must train and pass certain tests to earn the right to get their own Ikran, or Banshee in English. It is a flying creature that vaguely resembles a small dragon. You play from the point of view of a Na’vi taken from their tribe as a young child by the Resources Development Administration (RDA) which is a corporation of humans that left Earth to harvest profitable materials from the Jupiter moon Pandora. Humans had to leave Earth due to ruining the planet, making it nearly impossible to continue living on.
The RDA took the Na’vi children as part of a program called the Ambassador program where they would take young Na’vi children from their tribes and parents to raise them like humans and use them to bargain with the Na’vi to the humans’ advantage. The man running this program is called Mathew Mercer, and he was so dedicated to making sure the children would not leave that he killed the sister of the point-of-view character right in front of them when the children tried to escape. Years later, when Jake Sully forced most of the RDA to flee from Pandora, they were planning to kill the children. However, their teacher, Alma, hid them in stasis pods where they stayed for several years before she and the Resistance found them again.
The gameplay begins with you learning how to move your body again, aka learning the controls and getting used to them while escaping the facility. From there you learn how to fight, shoot a bow and arrow, and begin completing quests to further the goal of unpolluting Pandora and finally getting rid of RDA once and for all. Not only do you learn how to fight, but you also learn about the culture of the different tribes of Pandora, craft your own armor and weapons, and overall get to experience the unique world of James Cameron’s creation.