An Avatar game couldn’t get away with looking bad. The whole pitch of James Cameron’s sci-fi series is that each new entry represents the then-current pinnacle of CGI and motion capture technology. Avatar was groundbreaking when it hit theaters in 2009 and, while The Way of Water was never going to be quite as big a technological leap forward, it still made the CG-heavy blockbusters we had been getting in the late 2010s and early 2020s look amateurish by comparison. This is a series where a new entry only comes along when its creators can guarantee it will impress.
Avatar Is Built On Pretty
So, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora had to be pretty. Pretty is the name of the game. But, after sleeping on the first licensed game in Massive Entertainment’s 2023-2024 one-two tie-in punch, I’m shocked at just how good it looks. I wrote last year that Massive’s second jab, Star Wars Outlaws, looked shockingly good for an Ubisoft game. After playing a bit of Frontiers of Pandora, I realized that Massive is just really good at this. Maybe better than any other studio at making pretty the name of the game.
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The game is impressive from the jump, even though it holds back its ‘step out into the world’ moment for about an hour. It begins with your character, a young Na’vi, learning in a classroom at a human-run school on Pandora. The building you spend this intro in is sprawling and gray, a mix of concrete and metal. That could look boring, but as the level escalates to the characters escaping the facility, it becomes a showcase of the game’s graphical prowess. Shafts of light stream in through windows, fires break out, water pools in dented concrete. Characters (whether human or Na’vi) are incredibly detailed, as are the textures on the objects you pass by in the rush to the exit.
Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Nails The Natural World
And that’s before you get to the star of the show: the moment you emerge into the jungle. As I began exploring the surface of the planet, I was shocked by how densely packed it revealed itself to be. Most video game forests and/or jungles don’t feel like their real-life counterparts. When Ellie and Dinah are lost in the woods outside Seattle in The Last of Us Part 2, it just feels like they’re going down well-delineated corridors surrounded by walls made of greenery.
In open-world games like Breath of the Wild, forests often just feel like little areas that you can walk in and out of easily. Unless they’re big biomes like the Lost Woods or the jungle in Hyrule’s south, they’re mostly just patches of trees that don’t feel like they cohere together as one thing in the same way that real forests do.
The jungle in Frontiers of Pandora feels like a real jungle. The ground is covered with plants — and in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and species. The brush is thick, but all moves as you push through it. Trees are huge, and there are massive twisting vines you can climb on. Water ripples believably. And, beyond the light, there’s the gorgeous blue sky. The colors of all these environmental features are heavily saturated, too, so the world looks incredibly vibrant.
My only aesthetic issue with the game is its UI which, in its pursuit of an organic vibe, occasionally veers (like the Avatar logo itself) into ‘graphic design is my passion’ territory.
I’m not getting into the technical specifics because I’m not Digital Foundry, and I don’t have the expertise to discuss why, on a technical level, the game looks so good. All I can tell you is that very little this generation has impressed me graphically. Like most players, I watched Sony’s PS5 Pro pitch and shrugged. But Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora looks as good as any graphical showcase to hit either console in the past four years. If I was trying to sell TVs or consoles at Best Buy, I’d have this playing on every display.
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Avatar has a long intro, but it serves to make the first moment you experience Pandora extra special.