When Square Enix announced Marvel's Guardians from the Galaxy earlier this year, the biggest surprise to a lot of of us at EGM was the gamer count. Surely a game title in regards to a team of 5 heroes, each having a different but complementary set of skills, would be a natural fit for a co-op game. Instead, Guardians would focus solely on single-player, putting you in the role of Peter “Star-Lord” Quill, using the other four characters controlled by AI. Did developer Eidos-Montréal need to cut planned co-op support due to budget woes? Was this likely to wind up another big-budget fiasco, a hollowed-out shell of its original vision?
Now that I've beaten the game, those questions seem silly. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy isn't just a single-player game. It's the sort of ambitious, story-centric single-player game you don't really see much of outside of Sony's first-party studios. Like the recent work from Santa Monica Studio, Naughty Dog, and, to a certain extent, Insomniac, Guardians prioritizes its narrative and characters just as highly as it does gameplay. It isn't afraid to shelve combat for decent stretches, letting exploration and conversation carry the weight.
In that respect, Guardians from the Galaxy almost seems like the alternative of Square Enix's other recent foray into superheroics, Marvel's Avengers. There's nothing unnecessarily gamified or monetized here, no treadmill to help keep you playing forever upon your better judgment. Eidos-Montréal hasn't built a “game as a service” since it was wholly centered on creating a game like a story-and an excellent one, at this.
That story happens inside a slightly remixed form of the Cosmic Marvel universe, 12 years after a galaxy-wide war that pitted the Kree against an army of Chitauri led by Thanos. (If you're not current in your Marvel, which means blue aliens fighting bug aliens led by a big-chinned purple alien.) This form of the Guardians is comparatively new at being spacefaring heroes for hire, being on a dozen or so missions together but still no longer working as a cohesive team.
Gamora, adopted daughter of Thanos and the so-called “deadliest woman in the galaxy,” may be the newest member. As a result, she's yet to generate the trust of Drax the Destroyer, the musclebound alien who killed Thanos in retribution for that death of his wife and daughter. And Rocket, a gun- and tech-obsessed raccoon given sentience through Kree experiments during the war, is too much of a puckish rogue to be a great team player. Rocket's longtime companion, Groot, the last of a race of sentient trees who speak only by saying “I am Groot,” seems more on board with everything, but who can say.
At the heart of the Guardians is Peter, the goofy, womanizing leader. Kidnapped from Earth as a young teenager throughout the 1980s, Peter looks human but is actually the byproduct of the affair between his mother as well as an alien. Unlike in the films (but true to the comics), his absent father is J'Son, king of the planet Spartax-though that does not factor in to the game much beyond some optional dialogue and the backstory for Peter's transforming Spartoi blaster pistols.
Soon enough, the Guardians end up wrapped up in a cosmic mystery that unravels into a galaxy-wide threat only they are able to stop, with a creepy space cult known as the Universal Church of Truth at its heart. I will not say more within the interest of avoiding spoilers, but suffice it to say the ensuing adventure spans multiple planets and earns a host of side characters from the comics, including many of who have yet to appear in the MCU.
Eidos-Montréal has obviously attempted to recapture the humor of James Gunn's Guardians movies throughout, but the writing team clearly struggled to be nearly as funny. Most of the time, the sport chugs along locally of “mildly amusing.” Just one gag had a decent belly laugh out of me, though I chuckled several times. (I actually do need to give special credit to the game's form of Mantis, who is genuinely funny generally.) But humor isn't everything. Gunn himself has been fairly vocal about how exactly writing the Guardians movies allowed him to higher embrace sincerity, and there is a level of heart within the films that's just like important to their identity. On that front, Eidos-Montréal comes much nearer to parity.
By time the credits roll, you'll have a solid sense of who Peter and the other Guardians are as people, and they're going to have completed honest-to-goodness character arcs, growing not only together but because individuals (with the possible exception of Groot, because, again, you never know). All this, mind you, inside a game having a psychic Communist dog in a spacesuit and a theif with golden cube arms who shoots out beams of “faith energy.” If nothing else, farmville should serve as a corrective to the idea that games need a more serious tone or more grounded stakes to tell an engaging story about characters by having an underlying feeling of humanity.
If I've spent considerable time on story and character without diving into gameplay, that's partially a reflection of what's stuck with me the most. But it is also reflective of the fact that, in Guardians, the characters really do inform the gameplay. When you're exploring between fights, the main diversions are light platforming and incredibly light puzzle solving that need you to ask the Guardians to help-like having Groot grow a bridge for you or having Rocket crawl into a narrow hole to spread out a door. The rest of the space is stuffed with conversation, sometimes with dialogue choices that can change up the events (although not the end result) from the story.
And in combat, while you only directly control Peter-blasting enemies together with your Spartoi blasters and melee attacks-you're not likely to find very much success if you ignore your teammates. To deal maximum damage, you have to issue commands to another Guardians. Sometimes that means asking to consider benefit of environmental hazards, just like having Drax chuck a boulder or explosive barrel. More often, it's issuing commands for their special abilities. At the start, each Guardian just one, but you can unlock more while you gain xp.
The various Guardians have different specialities-Gamora deals targeted damage, Rocket does section of effect, Drax is nice at stunning enemies, and Groot excels at limiting their mobility-but later abilities go over enough that every character has an option that can bring about whatever kind of enemy you're fighting. Cooldowns are character-specific, rather than ability-specific, so utilizing a given Guardian's power means you need to wait a little to call on them again. The main one exception for this is the most powerful attacks, unlocked at specific points in the story, that have their own separate cooldowns.
Though it might sound a little daunting to manage all of this at once, you are able to and will get fairly confident with it after a bit of practice. The biggest adjustment, by far, is the interface. By holding on the left shoulder button, you'll mention a four-pronged menu, having a face button for each from the other four Guardians. Pick one, and you'll get a brand new menu with their four abilities, again mapped to face buttons.
The one real wrench within this is that Peter also has four abilities, which are mapped to an entirely different menu you bring up by clicking the control stick. Past the inelegance of having a separate way to access another menu that's doing virtually exactly the same thing, it is too easy to accidentally click on the stick while getting around during combat and launch off an ability you didn't plan to.
For another Guardians, though? It really works just fine. The truth that the action slows down when you are in the ability menu is a huge help, and there's even an option to alter how much it decelerates, together with a complete stop. Equally smart is the fact that a given Guardian will shout out a voice line asking how to proceed if you go too much time without needing their abilities.
I have no idea that I'd call the combat stellar, but it's entertaining, with enough variety among the enemies you fight it never gets old. I certainly admire the thought put in finding a different spin on AI companions, there are enough moments of fun synergy between your various abilities that you simply do actually feel like a team working together. Finishing moves can even dynamically generate all five of the Guardians to lay a collective smackdown on some poor goon, so you get occasional moments that feel like a muted form of a team-up fight scene from a Marvel movie.
If there's one persistent problem with the sport, however, it's that Eidos-Montréal doesn't appear to have mastered pacing-in either the gameplay or even the story. At the largest scale, the rear 1 / 2 of the game's narrative feels a little bloated, with levels that pack in lengthy parts of exactly the same standard combat and exploration, even while you're ostensibly building towards a big finale. There are points where sense at all of urgency appears to take a backseat, putting the gameplay at odds with what the characters are trying to accomplish (as well as saying).
In the moment-to-moment, you'll often find a mismatch between the amount of dialogue and also the amount of gameplay. Quite frequently, I found myself having to stop travelling to let a discussion engage in since i knew basically kept going forward it would be stop. It is good that the developers wanted to keep the characters active and talking throughout, but much less great that they didn't properly tailor the script towards the actual rhythm of gameplay.
And pacing is actually at the heart of the biggest gameplay misstep too: the Huddle. Among the game's most heavily advertised mechanics, this selection enables you to replenish a meter during combat and funds it directly into give a pep talk to another Guardians, rewarding you with sharply reduced ability cooldowns as well as an opportunity to kick butt to 1 of the licensed '80s songs around the (honestly fantastic) soundtrack.
The reward for achievement is great-you obtain a massive power boost and sick tunes to turn the tide of a fight or finish strong-but the actual act of huddling drags everything for an abrupt halt. First you have to listen to voice lines from a couple Guardians to gauge their mood, then pick between two options that best channel or correct what they are feeling. It's a solid 20 seconds of conversation when you were just in, and will soon go back to, the thick of combat. Beyond that, the right option is so painfully obvious that it feels like having you are making one at all is a waste of time. Sure, it's reinforcing the thought of teamwork and Peter as a leader, but it is not worth it. The combat flow would be infinitely best if the Huddle just activated automatically and kicked within the music following a flashy animation.
I'd also be remiss basically didn't mention the numerous bugs I encountered during my playthrough. I saw glitches of pretty much every stripe, most of which required me to reload a checkpoint or restart the game entirely to advance. That being said, Used to do polish off my playthrough before the day one patch arrived. After installing the update, I loaded up several chapters to spot check a few of the worst offenders, and people seem to have been fixed. I'd assume the sport is within much better shape now than it was when I played it, but I wouldn't be shocked if your few rough edges remain.
Still, I find myself unable to fault Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy too much for the places it comes down up short. For any game that puts so much focus on its titular characters, it's almost fitting the experience feels just as imperfectly charming because they are. Its not all joke lands, not every gameplay feature shines, but the resolve for exploring and reimagining the source material-and the ambition to test stuff you wouldn't expect-go quite a distance toward creating for your. Ultimately, the thing that surprises me most isn't that Guardians of the Galaxy is really a single-player game, but there aren't more single-player games attempting to compete on this level.
