'Frontiers of Pandora' Made Me Care About 'Avatar' In A Way The Movies Never Could

Avatar's Best Game Is A Perfect Prelude To The Next Film Cultural reconnection. Trone Dowd It’s been a punchline for over a decade that there are no true fans of James Cameron’s Avatar franchise. Despite both films doing exceptionally well at the box office, the series always seems just outside of the general zeitgeist up until the moment it returns to theaters. In an unexpected turn of events, the third time seems to be the charm for me. Weeks ahead of the upcoming movie, I find myself excited to return to Cameron’s sci-fi universe, largely thanks to Massive Entertainment’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora . While the game’s recent (and substantial) update got me to try this underrated action game once again, I’ve been totally enraptured by its surprisingly heartfelt story of one’s journey to reconnect with their own culture. Frontiers of Pandora flew under the radar when it was first released in 2023. It not only released relatively late in a year already packed with all-time great games, it also came a year after the second film broke box office records. I remember having plenty of positive things to say about it at the time. Its lavish open world, painstaking adherence to the source material, and decent combat showed just how much love and care went into making the definitive Avatar game. But releasing just days before a bunch of new games were announced at Geoff Keighley’s annual awards show did it no favors. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora recently added New Game Plus and a third-person option as a free update. Fast forward two years, and Massive Entertainment’s habit of improving its games significantly long after launch made me curious enough to check back in. Last week, just weeks ahead of the upcoming Avatar: Fire And Ash tie-in expansion, the developer released the game’s most significant update yet. It adds both a New Game+ mode for returning players, and the option to play in a third-person perspective. They’re both nice touches, particularly the latter, as it widens the appeal of the game to even more players. Starting a fresh save file during a much quieter year, I was immediately able to better appreciate everything it does extremely well. Frontiers of Pandora certainly follows the patented Ubisoft formula of putting the player in a staggeringly large open world co-inhabited by bad guys in high-security outposts. But it also understands how to change things up just enough to make it distinctly Avatar. There’s a surprising amount of downtime in Frontiers of Pandora . After the hour-long introduction that gets players acquainted with how the Na’vi navigate and survive on this naturalistic planet, you’re introduced to the many factions you’ll work alongside in the eternal fight against the villainous Resources Development Administration (RDA). You pay as a Na’vi who was snatched from their home as a toddler, and is now reconnecting with their culture many years later. It’s here that you realize that this fight won’t just require you to use violence. You’ll...

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