The Avatar video game is better than the movies.
I say this as someone who has dumbly adored James Cameron’s Avatar movies for a long time. The original 2009 film was my first ever midnight premiere, which I attended along with a friend who sat in the theater shirtless with his entire body painted blue. I can’t forget that experience, or the nearly three-hour bioluminescent journey that followed, and the series has kept me hooked since.
People talk a lot of shit about Avatar. They find the movies’ plots derivative, the characters forgettable, the run times almost inhumanely long. (The third movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is out now and clocks in at a whopping 3 hours and 15 minutes, not including previews.)
Those criticisms are fair. Correct, even. But the true Avatar sickos (hi) might ask, What if that experience could be even longer, actually? What if you could spend even more time trekking through the sprawling, glowing forests of a verdant alien moon? If that sounds appealing, boy, are you going to be excited to hear about the concept of video games.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft in 2023, lets you cavort around in the form of a 10-foot-tall Na’vi, the tribal species who live on the alien moon Pandora.
While the Avatar films are blockbusters that have melted the box office, the game was released to little fanfare and middling reviews, though it grew to become a sleeper hit. It has since garnered enough of a fan base that it has received significant updates in the two years since its debut, including downloadable content expansions and a free mode that switches the game’s first-person view to a third-person view, letting players bask in all their character’s big blueness. A new DLC story, titled From the Ashes, was released today, the same day as the third film of the series.
The game might be the best thing to ever happen to the Avatar series. Where the movies have their own stories to tell (family, love, that kinda thing), the game plays very differently with your own custom Na’vi.
It is a righteous ecoterrorism simulator wrapped in the most gorgeous botanical garden I’ve ever seen. Your gargantuan blue treehugger runs around a world where all the very pretty plants want to kill you. Your job is to impale puny human colonizers with your log-sized spears. By wiping out the bad guys and demolishing their camps that gush pollution into the air and water, you can allow the world’s foliage to grow back in its place. (Do not feel bad for the humans. They are sad, angry creatures, and I will kill thousands of them if it makes the pretty forest look even a little prettier.) Then spend all the downtime you want just hanging out in Pandora’s verdant paradise, bouncing across neon lily pads and running through spiral plants that go THOOOMP and shrink into the ground when you touch them.
