Done!
What a complex game to review. Gameplay is like a 9/10 but the story is a 1/10 (or -5/10 if you are an Avatar nerd).
I swear the writers must have not watched the movies, or actively disliked the movies. I hated how speciesist/arrogant they made all the na'vi.
Hardly any of the na'vi felt like na'vi. They're just humans in blue paint that act like humans and deal with human issues in modern human ways.
The two new regions were all but creatively bankrupt imo. Not like there's a lot you can do with a plains region, but it's just Earth Africa with a blue coat of paint. I was so excited for the cold region but it was just Northern California. I got so bummed when I noticed all the redwoods. The forests of Avatar aren't 100% original but when I went back it was like night and day with all the creative alien things. Like I love the weird silver snake tree things.
It feels most of the new stuff introduced is just lazy fan fiction. The menu at Animal Kingdom is more alien than all the cheeses and what nots in the game.
Gameplay wasn't perfect, I dislike that even the big bases repeated, but it was pretty dang good most of the time. Just so fun to play as a na'vi. Loved finding rocket launchers although they really screwed up my stealth attempts
Also really cool how some of the story missions went super deep into bases yet it was still all seamless. I don't think I've ever played a game that has blended an open world sandbox with linear story levels so well.
I played in "exploration" mode and most of the time that was pretty fun, but it's literally broken for some missions. "Go East from X to find us!" when the game actually wanted me to go West, or "Go to the coordinates" when there are no coordinates. Even when it'd say a specific location name, I'd have no way to search for that location by name. I'd just have to check every single settlement (I quickly learned to temporarily switch to "guided" mode and not waste my time).
When the credits finally rolled, I felt free. I skipped a lot of side missions towards the end so maybe I'll return just since I liked the gameplay so much, but it won't be for a while.
Also maybe it was just me, but the credits are kinda broken. They kept having random flickers and shifting sidways. Then once it got really dense with legal writing, it'd lag and half the screen would be black until the text popped in.