One of the best features is the
Huddle Up ability. Every once in a
while you can call the team together,
offer words of encouragement, and
re-enter the fray with a damage buff
cued to an ’80s classic pulled from
the game’s trove of licensed material.
CULTHIT
The story here is centred around the
usual universe-
threatening Marvel
gamut. There’s some
sort of hyper-religious
stellar church
corrupting the minds of
the Andromeda Galaxy.
Our motley crew is
here to stop it, even as
the odds continue to
pile up against us. The Guardians
might be a roving batch of greedy
malcontents, but at least they’ve got a
heart of gold. The broad-strokes
didn’t interest me much, but
Guardians does a good job integrating
the uber-high stakes into the
cloistered anxieties of the heroes
themselves. One of the cult’s first
victims? A girl who may or may not
be Star-Lord’s illegitimate child. How
could a bunch of daffy venerated
nerds ever seduce a chiseled
meathead like Drax? Maybe by
introducing the memories of his dead
wife and daughter. All of this is
buttressed by Guardians’ moral
choice infrastructure, which is clearly
ripped directly from the Telltale
convention. Along the way, Star-Lord
has a hand in shaping the team’s
plans and posture, which have a light
impact on the narrative. In the
interstitial periods between missions,
you can chop it up with the team on
the ship, akin to those elliptical
therapy sessions hosted by
Commander Shepard on the
Normandy. The writers here are
clearly bound by Marvel orthodoxy,
but it was still cool to see some of
their own flourishes. (Gamora, for
instance, is a huge action figure
collector in this timeline.)
I should reiterate again that
Guardians of the Galaxy is very much
singleplayer and plot-focused. You
move from chapter to chapter,
disembarking on all sorts of famous
Marvel locales, fighting through
beautiful corridors that are
occasionally broken up by some
heavy-duty cutscenes. That makes
the game a bit of a dinosaur, in a good
way. A number of the attack unlocks
are tied to certain wrinkles in the
dramatic arc rather than meeting a
certain threshold of resources. You
will spend precisely zero minutes
staring at talent trees or defensive
integers a la Kratos from God of War.
When I saw that the characters all
had their own suite of greyed-out
costumes, I thought for sure they
were going to be cinched by some
sort of depressing meta-grind and an
in-game real money
store. Nope, you just
find those stashed away
in the remote corners
of the geography as a
reward for taking the
time to explore. It
brings to mind the
storytelling
conventions of the
Uncharted and God of War series.
Eidos doesn’t punch at quite that
weight, but it does enough here to be
mentioned alongside their influences.SPACEBUGS
That brings me to the core,
debilitating issue with Guardians.
This game is frequently, flagrantly
broken. At one point I ran into three
different crashes within a single hour
of play. One was a bizarre soft-lock,
the other two were straight-up
hardcore freezes that required an
alt-F4 to escape. The first boss I
fought stopped moving a few times; it
was stuck in stasis as I blasted away
at its tentacles, scoring oodles of
cheap damage. The game routinely
believed Star-Lord had fallen down a
phantom pit, and it dutifullyteleported me back to some sort of
crucible of danger completely
haphazardly. I needed to reload
checkpoints in order to get certain
progression choke-points to trigger.
It’s bad, and Square Enix knows it.
When I first downloaded my review
code for Guardians, it came in at an
insane 1 50GB size. A few days later,
the company issued a new version
that reduced the file size and
promised greater stability. The
crashes I described earlier all
occurred after that patch. Another
patch came after and more will come,
but the odds that every physics
anomaly and crash will be swept up
within days of launch are slim.
This makes Guardians of the
Galaxy a difficult game to
recommend right now. Something
clearly went awry during
development, because it’s weird for a
singleplayer, linear game to have so
many bizarre performance issues.
This is something we expect in the
high entropy of Tamriel, not the
series of combat arenas and
connective tissue that makes up
Guardians. The closest analogue I can
think of is Star Wars Jedi: Fallen
Order; another Disney property that
shipped with a well-hewn narrative,
some neat combat tricks, and a
boatload of sundering technical
hangups. Unfortunately, I don’t think
Guardians of the Galaxy is quite good
enough to offset those problems the
way Respawn did.
But then I think back to a
sequence early on, where Star-Lord
runs into an old drinking buddy
named Lipless at a slimy dive bar in
Knowhere. The two of you fumble
through a turgid hair-metal anthem
that, apparently, the hero was too
blacked-out to remember writing.
The player chooses each line in the
song, and Star-Lord does his best to
half-mumble the lyrics to stay on
Lipless’ good side. Guardians of the
Galaxy wants to be a technicolor, star-
faring adventure worthy of the
multimedia powerhouse that shares
its namesake. It accomplishes that
with its story, its voice cast, and its
wonderfully cheeky ’80s pastiche. If
only the technical side could better
keep up with those ambitions.70
When you’re not forced
to reload your checkpoint
after agame-breaking
bug, Guardiansis a
surprisingly goodtime.VERDICTAt one point I
ran into three
different
crashes within
a single hourHIT FACTORY
The anatomy of a Guardians soundtrack15 %
Terrible ’80s adult
contemporary.
(See: Rick Astley- NeverGonna
Give You Up)
41 %
Synthpop nostalgia.
(See: A Flock of
Seagulls – I Ran
(So Far Away)34 %
Ironic
pump-up jams
that do actually
kinda hit in the middle
of a firefight. (See: Europe – The
Final Countdown)10 %
Original
recordings
designed to mine
the exact same ’80s
wistfulness evoked by the rest of
the tracklist. (See: Star-Lord –
Space Riders (With No Names))Marvel’s Guardians of the GalaxyREVIEW