'Guardians of the Galaxy' turns family into a game mechanic. It's clunky, but it works.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy took me by surprise. I've played plenty of games over the years that boast thematically appropriate mechanics, but I can't recall any that slid this easily into a story-driven action game.
On its surface, Guardians should feel immediately familiar to Marvel fans of all stripes, including those raised on a diet of only MCU movies. The titular super-team's lineup and interpersonal dynamics in many ways mirror those we've seen in director James Gunn's films.
That means lots of contentious sniping between Peter Quill aka Star-Lord and Rocket, whose disagreements always seem like they're on the brink of tearing the team apart. It also means we get quiet and often wordless mediation from Groot, gruff aloofness from Gamora, and comic relief-by-way-of-unfiltered honesty from Drax. There's plenty of '80s hair metal to go around, too — you can even play any song from the superb licensed soundtrack during between-chapter stays aboard the team's ship, the Milano.
Cosmic Marvel is best Marvel
Without question, story is the strongest weapon in this version of Guardians' arsenal. I laughed and I cried as I played. There's an emotional arc here that winds through a pivotal moment in the super-team's history. It may be best described as a "Year Two" take: They've only been on a dozen or so jobs when we start. It's enough for them to have known successes and failures together, but they still don't entirely know each other.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, then, is a game about how that dynamic shifts. In most versions of Marvel lore, the Guardians are a sometimes-dysfunctional family who pretty much always manage to beat the increasingly-stacked-against-them odds when they remember that unity and mutual love are the ties that bind, and their preferred weapon for vanquishing evil.
So it is here. Guardians, the game, is built from top to bottom as a family road trip through cosmic Marvel weirdness. Wild vistas like Knowhere, Contraxia, Seknarf Nine, and even space cop Nova Corps facilities come to life in eye-popping color and intricate, geek-thrilling detail. These locations are a joy to explore, even with scant few secrets to discover, because they're alive with points of interest for people who get the reference. But the titular team always keeps us grounded in the moment with their amusing banter and their personal journeys.
This is a twin success of the killer script from Mary De Marle, story architect of the latter-day Deus Ex games, and convincing performances from both the central cast and their supporting players. Jon McLaren's Star-Lord feels more Jason Bateman than Chris Pratt in his line delivery, but the Canadian actor capably navigates a role marked by a level of emotional complexity that surprised me more than once.
'Guardians' is built from top to bottom as a family road trip through cosmic Marvel weirdness.
The same can be said for Kimberly-Sue Murray, Alex Weiner, and Jason Cavalier — Gamora, Rocket, and Drax, respectively. Even Robert Montcalm, as Groot, seems to get that there are layers to the delivery of his character's single line: "I am Groot." You may notice a few odd bits for Murray and Cavalier, where they were seemingly directed to shout their lines in moments that don't call for such intensity. But hiccups like those are an exception in this 15-to-20 hour game.
There are other voice actors who will merit a shout once spoilers are less of a concern, but Alex Ivanovici deserves special mention. Not only does he deliver a superlative Cosmo, the telepathic talking astronaut dog from Russia, into this new corner Marvel Video Game Universe. He also voices a deep-cut surprise in a stand-out non-sequitur scene. Just... pay attention when Peter walks into a Knowhere bar as he searches for Rocket and Groot.
Really though, it's the main cast that carries this story, which swings as big as any cosmic Marvel tale. The publisher has never shied away from distilling enormous concepts like Eternity, Order and Chaos, and even Death — no spoilers, these are just comic book examples — into explicit characterizations that are trippy and grounded in equal measures.
This Guardians game nails the sense of bigness, with a small, seemingly inconsequential moment early on snowballing in a way that eventually leaves the team facing a universal threat. It starts simply enough: The crew has taken on the job of hunting and capturing a particular creature that's only found inside a "quarantine zone." This Nova Corps-protected area of space is a dangerous aftereffect of a galaxy-spanning war between Chitauri forces led by Thanos and, basically, everyone else. But once inside, Peter and Rocket make an unexpected discovery that unleashes a force of immense power.
I'm keeping this vague to avoid spoilers. But suffice to say: The journey matters just as much as the destination because of all the critical context you pick up along the way. Guardians gives players some level of control over the way things go, with dialogue options that seemingly offer a darker path through the story. But I couldn't bring myself to even flirt with tearing this beloved team apart. The camaraderie is central to their appeal.
Family as a game mechanic?
That central dynamic even comes alive in Guardians' basic play mechanics, which is to say the buttons you hit to move and interact and do battle. This is an action game first, and fights against an assortment of baddies are the propulsive energy that carries the experience between all the big and small story moments. And while there's no confusing this third-person action game for anything else, there's also something a bit different happening here.
Peter Quill is the only character you ever control directly. His punches, rocket boots, elemental guns, and small selection of flashier powers, which operate on a cooldown, are effective in a pinch, but he's not really built for taking on the threats facing the Guardians single-handedly. But Peter, the ostensible leader of this squad, can also call on his teammates at any time to direct their focus and have them dish out abilities of their own.
That mixture of immediate action and tactical thinking is at the heart of Guardians' most thrilling stretches of gameplay. Mastering it is no simple task, however. Giving orders is a multi-step process of holding down one button to bring up the team menu, pressing another button to select the desired teammate, and then pressing yet another button to choose the teammate power you want from the nested menu that pops up.
Time slows down while you're menu-juggling, but it's not quite slow enough to give you the luxury of carefully considering your options. That's balanced by the fact that each team member brings different specialties to combat encounters, and in ways that feel like extensions of both their powersets and their personalities.
Groot, the big tree alien and team mediator, is great for temporarily shutting down individual threats or even groups of foes. Drax, of "the Destroyer" fame, is a heavy-hitter whose blows leave enemies staggered and vulnerable to punishment. Gamora, the so-called deadliest assassin in the galaxy, excels at dealing big damage to single targets. And Rocket, explosives-loving rascal that he is, dishes out pain across a big chunk of the battlefield.
The story's central themes are unexpectedly reflected in the way combat is designed.
I struggled to get a handle on the pile-up of menus in the early hours. Guardians throws a lot at you very quickly, and while early mistakes aren't punished too harshly, it's hard to avoid failure just because of how layered the combat mechanics are. But all of it clicked for me at around the halfway point when I realized something important: The tactical side of Guardians combat is an essential piece of the game's success precisely because it forces you to constantly keep your team, your family, at the center of mind.
That's what I mean when I mention "thematically appropriate mechanics." I may not know in a split-second which Groot power has which effect, but I know who Groot is and what he's about, and I know what he brings to the battlefield. So I don't necessarily need to know which power I'm picking, just that it's Groot's crowd-control sensibilities I'm tapping into. This is true for the whole team, and it was clearly a guiding principle in the way developer Eidos Montreal built its combat system.
The chaos of later battles complicates that dynamic a bit too much at times, however, since the tactical layer of each fight depends on a finicky lock-on that doesn't always select the right target when you're trying to isolate a particular threat inside a larger crowd. It's frustrating to accidentally unleash Drax's big stagger ability against the wrong target and then have to endure a cooldown before you can try again.
If you're the sort of player who struggles with games that use the entire real estate of a modern video game controller, prepare for some frustrations. I'd argue that they're worth enduring for the story alone, especially if you're a Marvel fan. What's more: If they're too much — a scenario the developer seems to have anticipated — there's a generous selection of difficulty and accessibility settings you can tweak.
Want to take less damage, or deal more of it, or regenerate shields faster, or make your team's AI more competent? All of those categories (and more) can be tweaked individually in the difficulty menu. You can even mess with how much time slowdown there is when you're futzing with Guardians power menus. A separate accessibility menu also lets you turn off timed button-press events and tweak the specifics of input delays and control stick deadzones.
In this way, Guardians confidently joins a wave of other recent games that makes accessibility and approachability an up-front consideration. Given how frequently big games tend to forget that there's a wide and diverse audience of potential fans out there, I truly, deeply love to see such considerations given front-and-center placement here.
A nearly planted landing
There are admittedly some stumbles along the way. A few times, players are asked to pilot the Milano. These relatively simple sequences rarely last for long, but they feel like half-baked minigames that are unfortunately saddled with fail conditions. Trying again after a failure isn't the worst thing, but in a game that does hands-off blockbuster moments very well — extended cutscenes are Guardians biggest reward for progress — the spaceflight moments feel unnecessary. I'd much rather have watched those moments than played them.
Also, those looking for a miles-deep RPG with big skill trees and play-defining power-up choices to make won't find any of that here. Guardians is a lengthy game with an engrossing story, but it's a fairly straightforward and chapter-based gauntlet. Exploring when you can is always worth it, both for the Easter egg-y surprises and the extra power-up components you can discover. But all the latter really gets you is a quicker path to fully unlocking everything. By the end, most players will unlock everything.
That's not a bad thing, it's simply a matter of taste. Marvel's Avengers already did the forever game thing, with questionable (but I still think salvageable) results. Guardians is doing something else completely, and intentionally so. It's not a knock that the RPG elements aren't as deep as they could be, but it might not be what you're looking for. So it's worth knowing that up front.
Speaking for myself, though: I'm smitten. I love this interpretation of the Guardians and their cosmic Marvel adventures. I reached the credits and immediately fired up a New Game Plus so I could spend more time with the team. I even came to embrace the quirky yet wholly on-brand approach to combat. It brings originality and freshness of purpose to a genre where so many games feel too similar.
I didn't go into Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy expecting a heartfelt adventure about family and mutually assured wellness, but that's what I got. I can't wait to go back for more.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is out for PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch consoles, as well as Windows PCs and GeForce Now cloud gaming, on Oct. 26.