YMMV / Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

• Anvilicious: Similar to the first and second films, the RDA's main objective in the game is to secure a particular resource. However, while previous works at least tried to obfuscate the RDA's desire for resource extraction and exploitation through fictional stand ins such as Unobtainium in the first film and Amrita in Way of Water, the game literally has the RDA invading the Western Frontier purely to extract bog standard crude oil. And if that wasn't enough to hammer home the lesson that fossil fuels are evil, the game goes out of its way to show to the player that even the existence of oil on the surface is lethally poisonous to almost all Pandoran life.
• Complete Monster: John Mercer, the Executive Vice President of Frontier Operations for the RDA, epitomizes the worst of humanity thanks to his greed and xenophobia. As the director of The Ambassador Program (TAP), Mercer orchestrates a genocidal attack on the Sarentu clan, eradicating the entire population apart from the five children his program abducts. Under the guise of integrating Na'vi children into human society, Mercer subjects them to brutal training, severe psychological manipulation, and dehumanizing conditions. Mercer also repeatedly verbally and physically abuses the children, from lying to them about being abandoned by their own clan and confiscating the player character's songcord to severely beating Teylan for wetting his bed. This culminates in the cold-blooded murder of a child, Aha'ri, when she attempts to lead an escape. Mercer's cruelty only worsens after the Time Skip, as he authorizes region-wide oil extraction projects at the expense of Pandora's natural habitat and the Na'vi tribes, culminating in an ambitious plot to run a large-scale fracking operation that would decimate Pandora's Western Frontier. Mercer's relentless pursuit of power and control, coupled with his callous disregard for environmental sanctity and his utter lack of empathy, firmly establish him as a monstrous embodiment of greed and inhumanity.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: Many players and critics have pointed out that the game is essentially a reskinned Far Cry game, since it shares pretty much all of the same first person open world elements.
• Narm:
  • Alma's avatar body dies late in the story and it's treated like a legit tragedy even though the actual Alma is still alive afterwards.
  • Teylan incapacitating Mercer and saving the player character during the climax after hearing them sing their tribe's song could be a genuinely touching moment, but it falls sort of flat, given how he's already turned on Mercer by this point and has been helping you through nearly the entire final mission.
• So Okay, It's Average: The most generous reviews of the game typically state it's a competently executed if somewhat generic Ubisoft Open World Game very much like every other Ubisoft Open World Game, just with an Avatar skin on it.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Fans hoping this game would be a AAA sequel of the original 2009 game where one can choose between RDA or Na'vi were left severely disappointed with the Na'vi-only campaign. Especially for those who like the RDA that finds the human-allies of the Resistance to be incredibly cringe-worthy and one-dimensional.
  • While the game is closer to a Far Cry game than the 2009 Avatar game, there's still enough different about it to alienate Far Cry fans, including a lack of vehicles and utilizing animal attacks, a huge emphasis on crafting new equipment and gear, and no Ubisoft Towers. Further, the game is very hands-off: the player is expected to use labels on the map screen to find the next mission objective or side quest, look things up in the Notebook to figure out where to find the best of a specific crafting material is (which can include weather and time of day), and other context clue scenarios.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Teylan having a fascination with human technology and believing that it can benefit the Na'vi to the point where he decides to defect to the RDA could have raised questions about Na'vi having differing priorities or ideologies that could cause them to voluntarily side with the RDA. However, the game shows Teylan as being the only Na'vi with human sympathies and it is portrayed as misguided naivety for trusting an obviously evil Corrupt Corporate Executive like Mercer.

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