Ubisoft’s Avatar Game Is So Much Better Than Fire And Ash

I consider myself a pretty big Avatar sicko. I can name multiple characters from the franchise. I’ve read some of the comics and played the games. I enjoyed 2009’s Avatar when I saw it in a big theater all those years ago. I liked 2022’s Way of Water even more! And yet, I walked out of Avatar: Fire and Ash in December 2025 supremely disappointed. So, in a desperate attempt to feel something good about Avatar, I booted up Ubisoft’s 2023 open-world Avatar game, Frontiers of Pandora, and gave it another shot, and you know what, it’s so much better than Fire and Ash. 

I played Frontiers of Pandora back when it first launched on consoles and PC around a year after Way of Water. At the time, I found the game’s narrative to be threadbare and its gorgeous jungle landscape mostly devoid of stuff to do, so after I wrote about it for the site, I mostly set the game aside. Fast forward to a late night in December 2025, feeling down about how much I didn’t like Fire and Ash, and I decided to return to Pandora using Ubisoft’s game.

Okay, the truth is that I didn’t just return in the hopes that the game would make me feel good about Avatar again. I was also curious to check out the big free update for the game that Ubisoft released last month that added a third-person mode, alongside a new paid expansion featuring a new area. I’ve yet to play the new expansion, which stars a character from the main game fighting back against the evil RDA and their Navi allies from the Ash clan. I’ve been too busy getting lost in the world of Frontiers of Pandora.

Pushing through Frontiers of Pandora‘s bad opening section

The first 10 hours or so of Frontiers of Pandora are bad. You’re stuck in one location, the quests are forgettable, and for a good chunk of that time, you don’t even have access to your Ikran, a flying dragon-like mount. Bleh! Boo! Bad. But, after pushing through it over the last few weeks, I’ve discovered there’s so much to like about Frontiers of Pandora once you’re past that crappy start.

The biggest discovery was that beyond the jungle biome found at the start, Frontiers of Pandora‘s other biomes are vast and varied. One of my biggest gripes with Fire and Ash was that it felt like The Way of Water Part 2 and didn’t offer many new places to gawk at. FoP doesn’t have that problem. The vast plains you enter later in the game are incredible. Super long draw distances and massive alien trees bent over by the unrelenting wind offer up totally different vibes compared to the jungle biome of the game’s earlier section.

©Ubisoft

And then, hours later, and after some quests that actually address the complicated relationship between the Navi and their human allies that make up the resistance, I visited a new biome. It is covered in mist and feels like an alien version of the forests found in the Pacific Northwest. Even hunting in this biome feels different, with strange swarms of bugs ready to descend on every carcass if you let it sit around too long without harvesting. I also found a scared and withdrawn Navi clan of former healers that is the most interesting in the game.

And unlike the Ash clan featured in the latest film, they aren’t just evil warmongers, but instead are complicated beings trying to remember their place in the world while afraid of what happens if they return.

I’m reaching the end of Frontiers of Pandora, and I’m not sad at all. I’m actually excited as I have two past DLCs to dive into, each adding new regions, and then I have the recently released From the Ashes standalone expansion to play after all that. And if all of that content can be even half as cool as what I’ve discovered on my return to Pandora, I’ll be more than satisfied that I came back to this game that had remained buried on my backlog.