Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora first clicked for me when things got grim. Away from the cascading ferns and artfully twisted tree trunks, far from fronds and petals and whole plants that briskly pulled themselves underground as I approached, I found an RDA camp that seemed to be mining something from the earth. The RDA are the villains in this world, and they’re us: they’re the humans. Here, they had sunk a bunch of tall metal towers into the ground and turned the surrounding area to sludge. The grass was gone. The rocks were black with oil and smoke. Steam belched unpleasantly from many boxy, ugly pieces of technology that all seemed to come with grates and vents and nasty little legs to keep them from toppling on the seismic terrain. It was grim and abhorrent and I loved it.
These RDA camps crop up quite a lot throughout the course of the game, growing massively in complexity and challenge, sprouting indoor sections, underground sections, aerial sections, moving from minor set-piece to major dungeon. But they’re all variations on a theme, the theme being the trashing of paradise. You’re meant to feel angry, I think: how could you take the blue sky and green forests, the bounding creatures and the bioluminescent fungi and do this with it? Space nature’s laid on a disco for you here, and you want to just churn it all up, drill into it, crack it open? In truth, though, these camps always made me delighted. They meant that I was in for a bit of stealthing and a bit of sabotage and a bit of panic, working my way around huge mechs, picking off lone sentries, pulling this leaver, winding that wheel, shooting these glowing weak spots when they appeared to gout smoke into the air. And then…?
In Frontiers of Pandora, you play one of the Na’vi, the tall blue indigenous population of Pandora who are trying to push back against a human invasion. This means quests and rushing across an open world and leveling up and skill trees and loot that boosts your stats, all of that classic Ubisoft stuff. But in these RDA territory sequences, I truly felt the fiction of it all. Inside the RDA’s installations there would be heavily armed soldiers and patrol routes and big stompy mechs. All that and a handful of targets I needed to reach to deactivate machines or blow them up, or download something, or free something. You get the gist.
