Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora transcends its progenitor series Far Cry with awe-inspiring presentation, a captivating world and tense combat, but at present it’s buried under a mountain of technical trouble and it could take months to unearth a genuinely great game with patches and driver support.
When it’s working, navigating Pandora is a total joy: sprinting at mach five across the forest floor and parkouring across the serpentine tree roots that connect dense jungle brush to rock formations suspended in zero gravity. Avatar’s psychedelic Ecco the Dolphin’s color palette meets Starship Troopers’ industrial scifi look is translated beautifully from film to game, and the skyboxes especially are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The sheer density and variety of reactive flora and fauna is stunning. The whole thing is jaw-dropping.
The audio is also a standout, with a score that dynamically shifts from ambient strings that accent the natural sounds of Pandora to pulsating drums and droning synths during combat. It’s a soundscape that I expect will
