Review: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Is a Superhero Shooter with a Heart

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is blissfully freeing in a way that not many shooters are these days.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
Photo: Square Enix

The first few minutes of Eidos Montreal’s Guardians of the Galaxy are its most frightening, giving the same off-kilter “you’ve captured their stunt doubles” vibe as Crystal Dynamics’s disastrous Marvel’s Avengers. Here we get a Drax who sounds like he’s voiced by Dave Bautista but actually isn’t, a Gamora who acts like Zoe Saldana’s Gamora but who’s far more furious over her trauma than the films allow her to get, and a Rocket Raccoon who takes his cues from Bradley Cooper but whose accent suggests that the voice actor couldn’t figure out if the creature is a Yankees or Red Sox fan. Also, we get a Star-Lord who dresses like Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill, with the same ’80s hair-metal sensibilities but not much else—which is, all things considered, the most welcome departure from the films.

But where Crystal Dynamics failed to give us good reasons to care about their Dollar General Avengers, Eidos Montreal’s Guardians are propped up by solid writing and storytelling. Not long after we’ve followed our heroes on their first mission, this gem of a game turns on the heart and charm, endearing us to them with an effortlessness and wit that we haven’t seen since the glory days of Telltale and BioWare. Of course, that might partly be because so much of the game’s core mechanics crib liberally from both of those studios’ best work.

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Indeed, despite being a drastically less open and linear experience on a structural level, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy feels quite a lot like a fast and loose Mass Effect game. For one, a minor scavenging mission in a quarantined zone quickly spirals out of control, leading to the Guardians getting arrested and, then, a heist in order to secure enough money to pay their fine and a bit of cosmic-horror business involving a collective conscience called The Promise. Each chapter of the game continues the overarching tale but still functions as a satisfying standalone adventure. And when you’re not neck-deep in fun and frantic third-person gunfights against eye-catching, deadly aliens, you’re choosing branching dialogue options for the best way to keep space’s most dysfunctional family in one piece.

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If nothing else, it’s commendable just how much your choices can change the course of the story, which version of a stage you get to play through, or who shows up to help you at a crucial moment. It’s hard to ignore that the developers clearly used Telltale’s relatively recent Guardians of the Galaxy series as a template. And yet, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy feels more like the perfected version of that template. Eidos Montreal has chosen to focus on and run with the most important ingredient from James Gunn’s MCU films: how their characters’ traumas are constantly worked over like raw nerves. This game doesn’t lack for jokes, fun banter, lighthearted bickering, and all sorts of wacky hijinks, but we never lose sight of how the characters need a stable support system to carry them through the pain.

For that reason, it’s crucial that the game’s Peter Quill is more than just the emotional idiot that Pratt played in the films. He’s still an overly earnest goofball, with an Owen Wilson-esque aw-shucks demeanor and a voice redolent of Christian Slater’s, but now he’s emotionally intelligent enough to know that the Guardians need each other. Even when they screw up, even when branching dialogue may give him the occasional opportunity to play dumb, or to indulge in a cartoony moment of snarky humor, he’s never unsympathetic or slips into being an outright imbecile. That goes such a long way toward reinforcing his role as the sole playable protagonist in the game, and in the end, there’s no blaster or wild special grenade or jet boot-assisted finish that’s nearly as powerful as the ability to apologize to someone, or explain why a specific decision was made to someone who feels jilted.

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That, though, isn’t to denigrate the power of a good blaster. The addition of a Sekiro-like stagger meter makes some enemies more bullet spongy than normal, but otherwise there’s something very old-school about the gunplay here. Success means constant movement, matching elemental weaknesses, and carefully employing the other Guardians as support characters. The battlefields are chaotic, but once there’s enough special moves at play to combine, the game is blissfully freeing in a way that not many shooters are these days.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: Eidos Montreal  Publisher: Square Enix  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: October 26, 2021  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Language, Mild Blood, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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