168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora isn’t too bad! Our own Eric Switzer gave Pandora’s open world jaunt a 4/5 in his review, praising its ambitious environmental design and surprisingly dense narrative that acts as a canonical expansion to James Cameron’s uni🌞verse. I’m still only two hours into the game and figuring out how to best fly my Ikran while taking potshots at every single human I come across. Despite being a 🐼passive fan of the films, there is something so immediately compelling about an open world with immense sense of verticality, offering a level of freedom that feels natural in the context of the feature films it seeks to represent.
However, it is also a Far Cry game. It isn’t called Far Cry: Avatar, but you’d be ignorant to try and deny that Massive Entertainment didn’t take the general gameplay, pacing, and tech of the Ubisoft franchise before figuring out how exactly the lanky blue aliens would fit within it. Ahead of release and throughout the absolute dearth of marketing for the game, this blatant comparison has been discussed as a negative. In reality, willingness to take on the moniker of a compelli🎃ng yet overdone open world formula might be its greatest strength.
Even the opening is signature Far Cry. You are a lab-born Na’vi raised and brainwashed by the occupying human forces, spending years in classrooms listening to propaganda all while learning the techniques you’ll use to blend in and eventually betray your comrades once out in the field. You seldom leave the classroom during this lengthy sequence, occasionally back at the bunks with your comrades talking about what life might be like outside, and how harsh it is to hold onto a culture that these characters have never truly experienced. Yo💯u’re asked to sympathise with these characters moments before one of them is killed and you’re rushing towards the exit in search of freedom, which comes after a timeskip and Jake Sully liberating the Na’vi during the first film♈.
All the ingredients are there, including a laughably evil human bad guy who loves nothing more than to gun down alien children and mock you during class when daring to ask normal questions or embrace your sense of self. A kill order is given the moment it becomes known that humanity is losing this war, and he’s the first one to start pulling the trigger. Revenge will come eventually, but not until after we’ve run away from the threat and into the arms of allies who will 🅠teach us the ways of the world and how to take advantage of it. It’s a𓆉ll very Far Cry.
Pandora is a confusing playground at first, filled with myriad resources to gather and points of interest to seek out alongside main missions designed to help you learn the ropes. While you do play as a Na’vi, you are still an outsider who must prove to a nearby tribe that you are willing to embrace your identity and fight back against the human threat, even if it means turning against people you might have once called friends. So far, the storytelling is far from special, rote and predictable, much like the films that inspired it, but it’s well told and visually enthralling enough that I wanted to keep going, mostly to see what ꧒surprises awaited around the next corner. Or in the case of Pandora, miles up in the sky.
There’s a solid chance the open world is more bloat than brilliance, a typical quality of the modern Far Cry games, but these shortcomings are easier to swallow when the licensed coating does so much of the heavy lifting. Pandora is a gorgeous place, and the Na’vi come outfitted with resources and abilities that work beautifully with an open world defined by its freeform traversal and gathering of resources. I could pull out an assault rifle and just start blasting, but there is more fun to be had in crafting unique arrows, planting traps, or going in from the sky where not a soul will see me coming. Frontiers of Pandora has proven there is still life in the Far Cry formula yet when the stories and mechanics contained therein aren’t afraid to try something new, or lean into a familiar license where𒆙 games aren’t that common.
I kept thinking aboutꦿ what a Jurassic Park game would look like in this mold, where players are set free on Isla Nublar or Isla Sorna moments after hostile forces have taken over a park, allowing dinosaurs to roam free alongside mercenaries determined to enslave them. It would be silly and over-the-top, but there is so much potential in an open world Far Cry awash with dinosaurs or similar prehistoric life contrasted with modern technology and human enemies. More so than Primal anyway, which decided to be boring and use mammoths instead of giant dinosaurs. Or Terminator, Aliens, Indiana Jones, or pretty much anything that can be loosely crowbarred into the formula.
We’ve seen open world games mimic the blueprint put forward by Far Cry 3 in the past ten years, but there is something different about deliberately leaning into exact mechanics and fundamentals, a playful crossover appeal I’m ꦚsurprised Avatar is the first to capitalise on. If Ubisoft wants me to care about Far Cry going forward, or at least obvious analogues to it, why not lean into the bountiful wells of IP at its disposal and do something fun for once?
