Frontiers Of Pandora is the best looking game on PS5.

The Avatar games can't escape being terrible. All the hallmarks of James' sci-fi series. Cameron is that each new entry represents the pinnacle of CGI and motion capture technology at the time. Avatar was groundbreaking when it hit theaters in 2009, and although The Way of Water never made much of a technological leap, student But it also makes the CG-heavy blockbusters we received in the late 2010s and early 2020s look amateurish, by comparison. This is a series where new shows only come when the creators guarantee they will impress.

Avatar was created on Pretty.

So Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora had to be beautiful. Pretty is the name of the game. But after sleeping through the first licensed game in Massive Entertainment's one-two punch in 2023-2024, I was shocked at how good it looked. Last year I wrote that Star Wars Outlaws , Massive's second game, looked surprisingly good for a Ubisoft game. After playing some Frontiers of Pandora, I knew that Massive was very good at this. Maybe better than other studios that created a beautiful name for the game

Avatar's Upper Plains is a masterpiece of world-building.

The Upper Plains particularly contributes to Avatar's lore, which feels just as developed. with the Pandora we see in the movies

The game is impressive from the jump. Even if the moment is suspended You can 'step out into the world' for about an hour. It begins with your character, a young Na'vi, learning in a classroom at a human-run school on Pandora. The building you use during the intro is sprawling and grey. which is a mixture of concrete and metal may seem boring But as the level increases until the character escapes from the facility. It becomes a showcase of the game's graphical prowess. Light streaming in through windows, fires, pools of water in dented concrete, characters (whether human or Na'vi) are incredibly detailed. The same goes for the texture of the objects you walk past when rushing to the exit.

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Nails natural world

And that's before you get to the stars of the show. As soon as you emerge into the forest When I started exploring the planet's surface I was shocked to find how dense it was. Most video game forests and/or forests don't feel like real forests. When Ellie and Dinah were lost in the woods outside of Seattle in The Last of Us Part 2, it felt like they were. Walk along well-appointed walkways surrounded by walls of lush greenery.

In an open world game like Breath of the Wild, forests can often feel like small spaces. where you can walk in and out easily Unless it's a large biome like the Lost Woods or the forests of southern Hyrule, they're mostly just patches of trees. That doesn't feel like they're all connected together in the same way that a real forest does.

The forest in Frontiers of Pandora feels like a real forest. The ground is covered with plants of all shapes, sizes and species. The brush is thick. But everything moves when you push through. The trees are large and have large twisting vines that you can climb up. The water ripples convincingly. And above the light there is a beautiful blue sky. The colors of all these environmental features are also extremely saturated. So the world looks incredibly bright.

My only aesthetic issue with the game is its UI, which in its quest for an organic vibe. Sometimes it changes direction (like the Avatar logo) into the boundary. 'Graphic design is my passion'

I'm not getting into technical specifics because I'm not Digital Foundry and I don't have the expertise to discuss why on a technical level this game looks so good. All I can tell you is that this generation has made very little impression on me. Like most players I look at Sony's PS5 Pro pitch and shrug, but Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora looks as good as any graphical showcase to hit any console in the last four years. If I'm trying to sell a TV or console at Best Buy, I'll turn this on on every display.