IGN gave Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora a 7. You could have predicted that score in 2021.

Let's run the numbers. A licensed Ubisoft open-world game, built on the Far Cry chassis, with towers to climb and icons to clear, walks into IGN's review pipeline. What score comes out? You don't need to read the review. You don't need to play the game. You don't even need to know the game exists. It's a 7. It was always going to be a 7. This score was determined at the moment of the game's announcement, the way a coin flip is determined if the coin has the number 7 on both sides.

The verdict says Frontiers of Pandora 'doesn't contain as many genuine surprises as other modern open-worlds,' which is a beautiful sentence to publish underneath the least surprising number in games journalism. IGN complaining about a lack of surprises while stamping their nine-thousandth 7 is like a metronome filing a noise complaint. Brother, YOU are the absence of surprise. The review describes a formula and then scores it with a formula. It's formulas all the way down, a spreadsheet reviewing a spreadsheet, and somehow neither of them shows its work.

For context, here is a partial list of things IGN has also given a 7: Sonic Frontiers, Battlefield 2042 at launch, Gotham Knights, The Callisto Protocol, Starfield, and Star Wars Outlaws. That is a broken physics disaster, a dead live-service, a 30fps Batman game without Batman, and now a competent blue-cat safari — all occupying the same shelf. A 7 from IGN measures nothing. It's a ruler made of soup. If every game is 'good but flawed,' then the word 'good' has been stretched so far you could use it as a trampoline, and the word 'flawed' is just there for plausible deniability.

Here's the statistical tragedy: a 10-point scale with decimals offers IGN 100 possible outcomes, and they treat 99 of them like load-bearing walls they're afraid to touch. Frontiers of Pandora deserved SOME number — maybe higher, maybe lower, I genuinely don't know, and after reading this review, neither does anyone else. That's the crime. The math ain't mathing; worse, it's not even trying to math. It's just standing there, holding a 7, like it always has, like it always will.