After selling both of my current-gen consoles, it felt like I should probably actually play something on the PC to justify the bold statements in my last post, and what I picked was the 2021 Eidos-developed/Square-Enix-published “Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy”, which is one of those titles that exists solely to annoy people who want to have things in alphabetical order.

For the record, if I did own the game in physical form it would be under “G”.

I don’t own it physically, though, which is a very good thing in this case.  See, I actually bought the Xbox version of the game a couple of years back, on deep discount, and didn’t realize at the time that I was also getting a Windows license.  “Play Anywhere” really is one of those features that Microsoft doesn’t advertise enough.

GotG came out about a year after “Marvel’s Avengers”, also from Square Enix though from a different development team.  I’ve played the Avengers game, for maybe six hours or so.  It was… let me be clear that this is a personal opinion, lest it have any super fans out there who find this some day… *I* found it to be really dull.  Like, you know those 16-bit platformers that you’d get in the 1990s where Ocean or someone bought a movie license and did the bare minimum to reskin a platformer with the characters?  It was like that, just with a multiplayer looter shooter.

OK, that is tremendously unfair to the Crystal Dynamics team.  You could tell that there was a lot of effort put into the game, but it just absolutely failed to click with me.

Anyway, after that experience you may assume that I went into GotG with a bit of trepidation.  I’d heard it was quite good, hence the reason I took a chance on it, but I was quite prepared to be disappointed.  It didn’t help that there had been three GotG movies, of varying qualities, and I wasn’t sure where the game fit in or if it even was part of the same continuity.

It turned out to be based on comics continuity and mostly unrelated to the movies, so that worry went away quickly… and just playing the first chapter was enough to erase my other concerns and get me settled in for the long haul.

It’s a really, really fun time.  I wasn’t going out of my way to scour the maps for collectibles, so it took me about 20 hours to see the ending credits, and I enjoyed, like, 99% of those 20 hours.  The 1% represents a single QTE in Chapter 3, which I will call out as being (a) a “press A to not die” where the specific action you’re supposed to take is not at all clear and (b) immediately follows an unskippable cutscene which plays every time you fail the QTE and need to start over.

Oh, and maybe 0.01% is reserved for a computer terminal you access late in the game that you cannot back out of if you are playing with a controller.  Like, literally you are stuck on a screen until you press the F button on your keyboard, and there is no prompt on the screen to indicate that this is even a key you can press.

So 98.99%.  That’s still pretty good.

Wait, no.  There were also two fights where the game wouldn’t let me progress until I had cleared every enemy and didn’t recognize that I had done this, so I wound up running around with the combat music playing on a loop until I gave up and used the “reload last checkpoint” option to go through the fight a second time. Do we call that .1%?

And there was one crash to desktop but I’m not even going to take off .01% for it because the game is very well checkpointed and it cost me, like, 2 minutes of progress.

Final “fun score” of 98.89?  Sure, let’s go with that.

The actual process of getting from Press Start to “Thanks for Playing!” is a pleasant third-person shooter with minor amounts of platforming, a couple of vehicle segments where you pilot the Milano, and a fair bit of environmental puzzle solving, typically in the guise of “that door is locked.  How make unlock?”

From a horribly-simplified viewpoint, I would say that it follows the basic design of “this level will have four or five small fights, with a boss at the end.  Stick some exploring in between the fights so players can catch their breath and get some variety”, which is a pretty common design.

I’m not too ashamed to admit that I did get stuck on some of the “How make unlock?” bits.  It wasn’t always entirely clear how I needed to move something or whether the something I was moving was related to the puzzle or just a side path that took me to a collectible item.  What I DID appreciate was that the game didn’t start barraging me with hints immediately, but let me poke at the puzzles by myself for a bit before my team members started making suggestions.

There were also one or two boss fights where I didn’t feel like I was making any progress and had to pause the game and go to a walkthrough to make sure that I was shooting the boss in the correct way.  Your milage may vary here, naturally, but personally I like that it let me get a little confused instead of being super hand-holdy.

I found the overall balance of exploring-to-shooty-bits to be pretty good, and the shooty bits benefited from a combat system that was fast-paced and maybe a little bit overwhelming in a good way.  You’re always in control of Star Lord, but you will usually have all four of the other Guardians on the field at the same time.  They will do generally-useful things, but you can also tell them to do SPECIFICALLY-useful things and it can be a little overwhelming to track when your team members can do something and when their skills are on cooldown.  Fortunately, they will yell at you if you haven’t given them a command for a while.

All of this is in service to a story that has no right being as emotionally-satisfying as it is.  Much like the first Guardians movie, it’s about five misfits who start off not particularly fond of each other and grow into a dysfunctional family by the end.  Yes, it’s cheesy as all get out, but sometimes cheesy is good.  It’s narrative comfort food and I am completely in support.

This doesn’t just come across in cutscenes and dialogue, either – while you are needing to manually order team members to do things in service of the exploration bits at the beginning of the game (“Groot! make a bridge here!” “Gamora, cut that thing”), they are just making bridges and cutting things without your direction and without making snarky comments by the time you hit the last levels.  It’s a really clever blending of gameplay elements and story.

tl;dr : me like.  Would recommend.  Press “F” to pay respects close terminal screen.