Avatar Frontiers of Pandora review

 

Ubisoft kept one big surprise for the very end of its E3 presentation: a game based on the highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be arriving next year on PC and next-generation consoles, and Ubisoft says it will be an open-world first-person action-adventure developed by Massive Entertainment. That’s one of the company’s own studios, and it’s responsible for the likes of Ground Control, Far Cry 3 and The Division.

“There is one more exciting thing we would like to show you today,” said Ubisoft co-founder Yves Guillemot, introducing the game. “It is a glimpse of the amazing journey that awaits you in one of the most beautiful but dangerous places of all, brought to life by the latest version of our Snowdrop engine.”

Snowdrop is Ubisoft’s own engine and it’s featured in a fairly diverse set of games, ranging from The Division to South Park: The Fractured but Whole. While you might think that makes the game potentially quite scalable, Ubisoft was pretty clear that the game would be coming to PC and next-generation consoles, with no mention of PS4, Xbox One, or, alas, Switch. Instead, it’s set to appear on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Stadia, and Amazon Luna.

“In this new, standalone story, play as a Navi and embark on a journey across the Western Frontier, a never-before-seen part of Pandora,” Ubisoft wrote, adding a little more meat to the bones. “Explore a living and reactive world inhabited by unique creatures and new characters, and push back the formidable RDA forces that threaten it.”