It’s a bit depressing that the mere existence of a big-budget single-player game that’s not loaded with microtransactions or live service is worthy of praise, but it’s 2022 and here we are.
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy feels like a mea culpa from Eidos-Montreal and Square-Enix for the disastrous Marvel’s Avengers. It follows a similar formula in that it takes a property made famous by the MCU and tweaks it just enough so as not to bother with likeness rights. The difference is that this game doesn’t hunger for access to your bank account – what you see is what you get.
If you’ve seen Guardians of the Galaxy you’ll know the drill. All five movie heroes are present in a knockabout tale that sees them poke around the most obscure corners of Marvel’s outer space worlds to a selection of 1970s and 1980s pop. It’s a decent story, acted well, and told wittily – basically a high-quality mimicking of the James Gunn template.
It only falls apart a little when you play it. The game is essentially a series of corridors leading to combat arenas with lengthy cutscenes interspersed throughout. These are admittedly very pretty corridors, though no amount of epic fluorescent scenery can hide the tight railings hemming you in. Then again, after tens of hours in the near-limitless Lands Between in Elden Ring, a curated linear experience was a nice change of pace.
There is also some moderately interesting combat. You control Star-Lord, though success in combat hinges on you ordering the other Guardians to activate various special abilities. For example, you might want to order Groot to ensnare a group of baddies in roots, order Rocket to toss a grenade to soften them up, and follow it up with Drax shoulder-charging through them.
That’s the best-case scenario anyway. Guardians of the Galaxy is forgiving enough that you can generally just fire off their strongest abilities whenever the cooldown timer is up and squeak through to a relatively unstylish victory. In later levels things get pleasantly intense, with battles usually devolving into a neon-haze of explosions and laser fire. It all looks very impressive.
But there is an awful lot of it. The game runs out of fresh combat tricks about two-thirds of the way through, with the final third being a bit of a slog as you run through very similar encounters against blue-skinned cultists. By this point, you’ll have upgraded all the characters to max level and you’ll only die if you’re particularly careless.
There are also a few more specific gripes. You give orders to your team-mates with L1 and fire special ammo with R1, and to activate a ‘huddle’ (basically a big temporary buff) you press L1+R1 together. I activated this by accident many more times than I used it purposely, and watching a long unskippable mini-cutscene play out each time was a pain.
There are also some entirely vestigial instafail QTEs. They’re easy enough, but are so infrequent that whenever one does finally arrive it always caught me by surprise and failed once. Fortunately, you can completely disable them in the options menu and as they add absolutely nothing to the experience I suggest you do the same.
Quibbles aside it’s a fun and largely friction-free ride, albeit one that doesn’t deliver as much straightforward joy as – say – Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man. But hey, if the future is decently fun, competently written, and flashy Marvel games like this then bring them on.
Pixel Hunted 