Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora can be awkward but I'm a sucker for the fantasy and it delivers it
I’m relieved. I worried about the new Avatar game when I read Chris’ preview earlier in the year because there was footage of gunfights and talk of loot systems and crafting. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s not it – that’s not the Avatar fantasy.’ I like the films – there I’ve said it – because they take me away to a fantastical place where the tall blue Na’vi people live in giant trees and run around in loincloths and fly around on lizard dinosaur things. That’s the fantasy – that’s what I want. I want to feel like I’m in the films. It’s with that in mind, then, I tell you “I’m relieved”, because Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora absolutely gets that – and it manages to hit the fantasy in some quite spectacular ways.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora previewDeveloper: Ubisoft Massive-ledPublisher: UbisoftPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases 7th December on PC, PS5, Xbox Series S/X
Perhaps obviously, then, in the game I am a tall blue Na’vi. I’m jumped into the game about a quarter of the way through, so I miss all the story set-up, but there’s a separate trailer that explains the background of who I am and who you will be. In short: we were apparently kidnapped by the RDA – the humans – and now we’ve run away back to our Na’vi family, and we’re learning to reconnect with life there.
What’s important is that the Na’vi treat me as one of their own and I live among them, which means I am free to come and go from their gigantic hometree bases as I please. They talk to me, they give me supplies as long as I donate things to the wider community too, and they give me tasks to fulfil. As far as humans go: I have nothing to do with them. They are still the number-one threat to the world but besides a couple of squads patrolling in the jungle, I don’t see them. I work for the Na’vi.
Being a Na’vi also means I like a Na’vi, which not only means I am taller and stronger and more athletically capable than a human, but also that I feel and sense the natural world around me more strongly. I can reach out and touch plants that will react (mostly kindly) towards me. I can soothe animals that are afraid of me, and then help them by pulling human tracking devices out of them. I can even focus my Na’vi vision to see the scent-trails of animals and points of interest in the jungle around me, or determine whether lifeforms are hostile to me or not. I feel as though I belong here, in nature, and it is a kaleidoscopically colourful and beautiful place to be. Do you remember the sequence in the original Avatar film where Jake Sully, as a Na’vi, experiences their world at nighttime for the first time – a kind of bioluminescent splendour? It’s like that; neon pinks and purples and blues radiate softly from plants around you, bathing it all in the most appealing hues.
