What little variety there is also finds itself undone by a lack of imagination beneath the surface: an unusual Na'vi mission, for instance, has you fighting an RDA dropship, but just has you doing the same thing three times (climb a ladder, effectively), and the third time is actually the first location again. There is often a sense of grind to the first few missions in a vast adventure - even brilliant Ubisoft games like Assassin's Creed II take a while to get going - but unfortunately the pattern is stuck once set: you're simply asked to wander between distant yellow markers on the map screen, then dispatched to another marker, sometimes to fetch plants, sometimes to speak to particular people, or sometimes to get in a fight. However, things take a turn for the worse around the time you realise implication is about the worst of it. Even when you get out amongst it, the game works to maintain that sense of being lost in the unknown, whether as isolated, overmatched RDA troops out in the wild or as a not-quite-Na'vi with much to prove, a traitor to your real species.
The RDA soldiers discuss the massive fences they had to erect because otherwise the plants literally bite your arms off there's panic in the ranks as sirens go off to signal the local fauna stampeding the barricades and your weapons seem flimsy in the face of so much implied threat. Initially, it really is the world and its mysteries that draw you in. Some will mock James Cameron's vision of an alien planet (choice quote from one friend of Eurogamer: "Did it really take him 10 years to come up with a blue horse?") but it's nice to be in a colourful world for once (and besides, the horse has four front legs, and you can ride on it).
Alien blossom and petals flutter on the breeze amidst bright, kaleidoscopic fauna, misty rivers and the soaring highways of broad boughs and jostling canopy. While the order you visit locations and your focus once there is very different for each campaign, you are also running around Pandora in both cases, and so whichever path Ryder takes you still get to enjoy the lush environments Ubisoft Montreal has pulled together using a modified Far Cry 2 engine.