Audio Design

To back up the incredible visuals, the audio design is also pretty strong, with full ray-traced audio in the works. Weapons or objects echo realistically depending on whether you’re inside a cave or out in the open. Footsteps and other sounds can be traced with a high degree of accuracy. And most of the objects have their unique sounds.

The soundtrack also features memorable scores by Pina Toprak, an Emmy-nominated composer, who follows the style of the music featured in the movies with beautiful and spanning sounds encompassing the beauty of Pandora audibly.

Bugs/Glitches

Massive Entertainment has done an excellent job here finely polishing the game on release. It has become such a frightful and depressing norm to see PC ports get treated like absolute trash with horrible performances on release dates throughout recent years, that seeing a game like this come out with a myriad of different PC-specific settings, features, and smooth performance, is a sight to behold.

Truly, the game runs smoothly, there are no shader compilation stutters, no game-breaking bugs, or even issues in the multiplayer co-op aspect. In our time playing the game, there was nothing more than very minor clipping issues for certain objects during combat. The AI of enemies and the wildlife is tight and believable.

Season Pass Plans and Game Editions

This game features a season pass, which comes with the gold and ultimate editions of the game, and is part of the currently common trend of including such things in a game. Is it worth it? Currently, the plans include a Story Pack 1 coming in the Summer of 2024 titled “The Sky Breaker” and another Story Pack 2 coming in the Fall of 2024 titled “Secrets of the Spires”. There is also a bonus quest “Familiar Echoes” available at launch involving infiltration of a highly secured RDA military base.

As of now considering the price, which almost effectively doubles just to get these passes, it might be worth waiting to see how they pan out first. Unless you are a huge fan of the Avatar series or like the game, at which point you can upgrade anyway, consider holding off.

The game comes in three editions:

• Standard Edition ($69.99) – Includes just the base game, nothing more, nothing less. A good pick.
• Gold Edition ($109.99) – Includes the base game + the season pass. As mentioned above, you might want to wait to see how things pan out with the season pass DLCs before buying it right away.
• Ultimate Edition ($129.99) – Includes the base game + season pass + “Ultimate Pack” + Digital Art Book. The ultimate pack includes a bunch of cosmetics, such as the Sarentu Heritage Pack consisting of a premium weapon skin, character cosmetic set, and a banshee cosmetic set, and the Sarentu Hunter Equipment Pack, featuring one unique weapon and a character gear set. If you are a sucker for cosmetics in a single-player/co-op game, by all means go for it.

The Digital Art Book is a nice touch though and has some good artwork showing off various things in the game and worth it, although considering the price of the Ultimate Edition being twice of the Standard one, it might not be worth it just to get the art book.

This game is also playable with Ubisoft+, which is Ubisoft’s subscription-based gaming service similar to Game Pass, and at $17.99 per month offering you the Ultimate Edition of the game, this is worth considering. You also get access to a whole host of other Ubisoft titles such as the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry series and is worth it if you don’t care about owning the games forever and just want to play through it once and be done with it.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, an excellent entry to the world of Avatar, backed up by incredible visuals, audio, and vibrant environments that capture the wondrous aesthetic of the world of Pandora in all its glory. With a fun combat loop to boot, more akin to Crysis than Far Cry, this game is worth considering especially if you are an Avatar fan. If you have a friend to tag along, the co-op mode makes the game even more fun. In a year filled with broken PC releases and broken promises, this game is a breath of fresh air running flawlessly on PC with barely any bugs at launch.

The only drawbacks would be its sorta generic story and characters, and many cutscenes being just people standing around talking. But thankfully the other aspects of the game back it up and save it from falling, with excellent traversal and fun flying mechanics contributing to the joy of exploration. This may not be the best game of the year, but it certainly is the most breathtaking especially if you have the powerful hardware and HDR to boot. If you have the money and love the idea of running around in a lush forest environment and beating up enemies as they come, you’d want to give this a try on PC. And even otherwise, the Ubisoft+ subscription offers a great way to play it without breaking the bank, as this game doesn’t hold much replayability value at the moment.

Our Rating

★★★★★★★★

7.5/10

Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment has crafted something truly spectacular in terms of environmental and visual storytelling here, with an emphasis on traversal and an involved combat loop to boot, but its straightforward story and characters let it down.

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