This weekend I wrapped up my play-through of Guardians of the Galaxy and had a pretty great time with the game. I started the game up on Thursday and last night early in the evening I finished the final chapter. All told if steam is to be believed it was a little over fifteen hours worth of game-play. I have to admit I had initially shown zero interest in this game because I fully expected it to be similar to Marvels Avengers since it has that same sort of feel to it. If someone would have told me that this was originally intended to be an expansion for that game but was spun off into a single player adventure… I probably would have believed them because it is going for the same “almost MCU” graphical style.
However where Avengers felt like a generic rehashing of the looter shooter genre… Guardians of the Galaxy has so much fun and heart packed into this short experience. It does a really excellent job of splitting the difference between the comic book Guardians and the MCU Guardians. If you were a fan of the comics, you get a better version of Starlord and Gamora as well as a lot of interesting easter eggs along the way and characters you likely never expected to encounter. If you were only a fan of the MCU movies, then the characters are close enough to make it feel fairly familiar and still be an enjoyable ride. The story told is extremely enjoyable and has all sorts of twists and turns and chaotic interludes before wrapping up with some pretty damned emotional moments. Each of the characters grows as you travel through this adventure… well minus Groot maybe because we still don’t really know for certain what the hell he is saying.
Probably the worst thing that the game has going for it, is that combat in general is pretty bland. It starts off fun enough and as you unlock additional elemental weapons those sprinkle in some entertaining effects, but ultimately feels very repetitive. Combat tends to come in waves where you encounter a few packs of baddies before moving on to the next area, and there are absolutely times especially towards the end where I wish I could have skipped some of it. The game would have also benefited greatly from an ability to swap your perspective between the Guardians. You are stuck playing shootmans the entire game when it would have been more entertaining if you could have taken over Gamora or Groot and changed up the pace of combat greatly. There is a “skill reload” system where if you time your reload at exactly the right time it fires a pulse of energy that deals a large amount of damage. However after doing this hundreds of times it just feels gimmicky and not really fun anymore.
The game also has a lot of mini-games, where you are asked to do a thing with little to noexplanation of how it works. The worst of these is the Llama puzzle. Essentially Kammy the Space Llama likes it when certain characters sing, and hates it when other character sing… and you have to use this in order to steer her into this target zone. I do not love mini-games in the best of times, but I sincerely wish that there were skip buttons when one of these comes up in a game so that we can resume playing the ACTUAL game. The other problem that I ran into constantly is the fact that ship combat really does not work with a mouse and keyboard. The controls are way the hell too twitchy with the mouse and I wound up having to hook up a controller each time the game decided I needed to dog fight in the Milano.
The other challenge that I encountered constantly is that the game is exceptionally bad at messaging things that you need to do. Often times you learn what you need to do by failing… over and over again until you finally realize where you were supposed to jump at a moments notice. This happens constantly with any section where you are sliding down a chute, and pieces of the ground drop out from under you… and you effectively need to know to jump BEFORE this happens not in reaction to it happening. Generally speaking the game resets you back quickly and you can get into the action and try again. However there are a few cases where this happens AFTER a cutscene and the checkpoint is before the beginning of the cutscene forcing you to sit through the dialog again before trying to do the thing correctly. You can manually save, but these are mostly useless because upon loading the save you will start back at the beginning of the nearest checkpoint rather than the exact moment you saved.
One of my favorite parts about this game is the huddle system. Every so often during the battle a synergy meter will fill and you can “Huddle Up”. During this you talk to your team and based on their current moods you either need to tell them something to bolster the moods or something to calm them down and keep them from getting sloppy. If you make the right decision, they get pumped, gain a buff, and you are treated to a montage set to some 80s song. The music is absolutely one of the highlights of the game, and much like the MCU movie it is a soundtrack picked out from the greatest hits of that era. The huddle theme though can be a little weird at times… like during one boss fight it started playing “Don’t Worry Be Happy” which is not exactly asskicking music.
I get that at this point… you are thinking… Bel you have mostly just talked about negatives here, why should I play this? The truth is, I was sold entirely for the story experience. In fact at some point pretty early into this experience I dialed the difficulty down all the way just so I could get to the next bit of story a little quicker. Honestly for me I probably would have liked this better as a walking simulator or something more akin to the Telltale Style of adventure game. Combat was fine, but not terribly enjoyable and the boss battles often times felt like they drug on two or three times as long as they should have. The story though was a freaking blast and I hope that maybe this same team gives us another Guardians adventure in the future.
So where I land on this game is that I am very glad that I played through it. Would I suggest it to someone who is a fan of the Guardians comic? Absolutely, there are a ton of Easter eggs that you are going to spot along the way. Would I suggest it to someone who has only ever seen the movies? Absolutely, it is going to be close enough to what you remember to still feel familiar. However in both cases I would probably suggest waiting for this to go on sale. The combat is not terribly enjoyable and just feels like busy work to gate you from getting to the next bit of story. If you do pick it up I suggest playing on the lowest difficulty because I think it will be the story that keeps you going rather than the combat that mostly feels the same at the end of the game as it did at the very beginning.
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