Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

[Luminary]

Guardians of the Galaxy released yesterday and I’m curious if anyone else has picked it up yet or plan to. I’m only in the middle of Chapter 3, but wanted to share my thoughts so far. I’ll probably post a follow up once I beat it.

They nailed the chemistry between the Guardians. I love that the team is all together and established from the start, but hasn’t been for very long. Their interactions with each other are fantastic and it gives the gameplay so much energy as you listen to their banter while exploring and fighting. There have been some genuinely funny moments and video games usually don’t make me laugh that much. Of course, the dialogue choices giving you unique interactions definitely will add to the replay value of the game despite it not affecting the overall outcome of the story as far as I know.

Right now, my only negative (aside from a few glitches here and there) is the combat. At first it was kind of frustrating having to shoot at enemies that seemed like it would make more sense to use a melee attack against. I’m still getting used to hanging back and shooting from a distance while letting Drax and Gamora handle the melee stuff. It’s growing on me though as I unlock more skills, so I’m hoping I start to enjoy it more soon. I can almost forgive them for not making the whole team playable as you do still need to use your whole team and their skills to win fights rather than just relying on Peter.

I also really appreciate the wide range of accessibility options the game features including being able to increase subtitle size! This is such a simple thing that all games should have.

Overall, for how quickly it was announced and released, I think this is a pretty great game so far. Not GOTY material or anything, but just a really enjoyable experience. Certainly an improvement from Avengers by a wide margin. I haven’t seen a lot of chatter about it online, but I do hope people will give the game a chance as I’d love to see more single player story driven Marvel games.

 

[Luminary]

I beat the game a couple nights ago. Overall, it was a solid experience. I surprisingly found myself liking these versions of the characters as much or more than their MCU counterparts. And I appreciated how many references there were to the cosmic side of Marvel comics.

The game definitely has some bugs, but is still enjoyable if you can look past those and hopefully they will be patched soon. Square Enix’s western studios really need to shape up when it comes to releasing buggy games. But I have a feeling they may not have been given enough investment to delay the game due to Avengers’ lackluster performance, which is a shame.

The combat was pretty repetitive and felt more like a chore to get to the next cutscene. The few unique boss battles were cool and I wish there had been more of them throughout the game. Other than that, the enemies were mostly boring fodder. But there was at least more variety in the enemy designs than Avengers had.

The story and characters make up for the game’s faults. Both were surprisingly deeper than expected. I appreciated that while the characters have pretty similar characterizations and humor to their MCU counterparts, they were explored on a more mature level. Drax is the biggest example since he is strictly comic relief in the MCU, but is a much more three dimensional character in this game.

I hope people give it a chance, even if you need to wait for it to go on sale.

 

[MATGSY]

Could've done with less talking.