Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Secrets of the Spires review — Hacker Na’vi

The final DLC pack for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, titled Secrets of the Spires, initially had me pretty excited. It takes you to a new part of the moon to find a Na’vi tribe of warriors called the Kame’tire. This area is full of floating islands and deep canyons, and for the first mission you need to reach your destination without your Ikran. This leads to a really fun, pure platforming mission with very few enemy encounters. It’s a blast and something very different from the main game, which in my eyes is what a DLC should do. This is followed by a few missions focusing on your Ikran, upgrading her armor, learning to jump off her, and getting a brand new weapon. Even if I wasn’t interested in the story, the game was doing some new things that I enjoyed.

Then you’re straight back to sneaking through RDA bases and fighting the same enemies for the rest of the DLC. To say this was a disappointment would be an understatement. The sneaking and shooting mechanics are fine, good even, but in a world with so much potential and with other great gameplay modes already in the game it’s incredibly boring to revert to the same thing over and over. It all leads into an unsatisfying finale that’s trying to set up a sequel.

Before that, though, there are a few neat things you unlock. You can now craft armor for your Ikran, giving them what’s essentially a second health bar. It’s incredibly useful, especially in the frequent aerial battles this DLC puts you in. It’s also nice to have when you’re running low on health from a ground battle, as you can hop on your Ikran and dodge attacks while your HP regenerates under the shield.

You also get the new mounted crossbow, and it’s fantastic to finally have a good weapon to use when flying. I usually resort to the machine gun, but when that runs out of ammo I’m stuck trying to shoot arrows, which are much harder to hit with and seem to do less damage against RDA crafts. The crossbow strikes a nice balance between needing to aim with arrows, and the damage of bullets. You can also craft more of them in mid-air, so you probably won’t run out. I don’t feel like it changes the game drastically, but it’s a nice addition.

That’s about it for Secrets of the Spires. It adds some cool things, there’s a new map to explore, the story still feels generic, and missions still rely way too much on hacking minigames. It’s basically more of the same. That’s not what I personally want in a DLC, and thus was just going through the motions here, but it’s not like this is a bad DLC just because of that. The game is still good, and I imagine this will be fine for those who just want more Avatar.

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