Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – The Sky Breaker review — Moving on

I enjoyed playing and immersing myself in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but forgot about it completely after posting my review. The same could be said for the Avatar franchise as a whole. While it’s still good, the game’s first DLC – The Sky Breaker – isn’t trying to buck that trend. Like a lot of Ubisoft’s first DLCs, Sky Breaker feels like the main game but more compact. If you enjoyed Frontiers of Pandora, you’ll like this just as much.

The Sky Breaker DLC sees all the Na’vi clans coming together for the Great Games, a festival and series of athletic challenges taking place in the Upper Plains. Of course, once the games get going the Resource Development Administration (RDA) strikes back. While they have caught the clans unawares, now’s the perfect time to finish off The Ambassador Program (TAP) once and for all, so you and your friends can finally escape the ghosts of the past.

This leads into you doing the same things you do in the base game: flying around the open world, sneaking into RDA bases, and earning new gear. I initially thought this would be something of a mini-game break, as before the story proper begins you can take part in some of the games. I played a mounted archery contest and a platforming speedrun up a mountain. I really enjoyed these changes of pace, and was a bit disappointed when that wasn’t the real focus of the expansion. You can thankfully access them again after the main story, which isn’t too long.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the story, but I definitely would have gotten more out of it if I had remembered who most of the characters were. We do get a lot more Teylan, which is great because he’s a fun character, and Alma has something of a mirror in a Na’vi who betrayed his clan. With regards to Alma though, it really feels like the story just doesn’t know what to do with her after having the player decide how they feel towards her in the main game. I chose not to forgive her, and while Sky Breaker somewhat leans towards forgiveness, it doesn’t make much of a statement or impression here either way.

The gameplay meanwhile is still pretty fun. The stealth feels tight and combat is deadly. My favorite parts are the movement and platforming, and Sky Breaker combines this with stealth in a few sections to great results. There’s also a fight or two that explicitly encourages you to fly into battle on your Ikran, which makes the dynamic of battles feel completely different, focusing on evasion and speed rather than moving between points of cover. I’d love it if the next expansion takes place on a series of floating islands or something, putting your flying and platforming to the test.

I enjoyed revisiting Pandora in this DLC, even if I’ll probably also forget what happened in the story once I finish writing this. It seems to be the franchise’s curse. What I didn’t enjoy though was how glitchy the game remains after launch. I experienced frequent crashes when taking screenshots through Ubisoft’s own overlay, cutscene audio would play all at once rather than line by line, and more than once I got stuck in some geometry and needed to reload. I can usually excuse these types of issues before launch, so long as I get confirmation the developers are working on it, but it’s been over half a year since Frontiers of Pandora released. It’s still playable, but it could be much better.

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