Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

The second game I played while waiting for Atomic Heart to get patches, was Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Like Crystal Dynamics before, was Eidos-Montréal too tasked by their (now past) overlord Square Enix to make a game set in Marvel's comic book universe. I think the poor reception of Marvel's Avengers earlier hurt this game's initial sales, people being hesitant to jump into a possibly similar mess even if this one is solely a single player game. The general consensus on Guardians is positive but I personally found it a fairly tedious, sometimes even painful, of an experience.

Grating comic book license adventure

I probably wouldn't even have considered playing the game if not for the developer. The 0451 code appearing early on can't be considered a declaration of lineage this time but a mere reference. Guardians definitely isn't an immersive sim but a linear third person action-adventure game. The code felt more like a cry for help, Eidos-Montréal saying they would rather be making a new Deus Ex game or something. Maybe that's just me though.

The game begins on Earth in the late 1980s, where our protagonist Peter Quill is still a teenage boy. Young Peter is visited throughout the game few times to give Star-Lord bit of an origin story and to solidify the game's theme which is dealing with loss and letting go. It's not the worst theme there is but I feel like I've visited it enough already in various media and this one didn't add anything new. Coming to terms with loss is also the one thing that is common for the random collection of aliens that form up the Guardians of the Galaxy group.

In the present, the Guardians seems to have been just established officially: their purpose to take on random jobs around the galaxy to make living. I don't know if this game is supposed to be in the same continuum as the films of the same name, of which I've seen the first one -- and barely remember anything of it aside it being boring and unfunny. Regardless, the simple job the Guardians start with spirals into a big quest to save the whole galaxy.

The characters sure like yapping and the majority of what they have to say is not interesting. The constant bickering and them vexing each other is tiresome: a mandatory and tedious journey that needs to be done before they can feel like they're on the same side at the end. I wonder how many times Peter ends up asking "Can we talk about this?" over the course of the game. And then of top of everything, one of the group members is the plant creature whose only line is "I ᴀᴍ ɢʀᴏᴏᴛ" with various inflections and tones.

The whole setting is such an amalgamation of arbitrary things. I feel there's no rhyme or reason to any of it. Just random ideas people have come up with and then thrown together. All the different species, so many different visuals -- it's simply too busy and too much. I did, however, like the unearthly locations you get to visit.

To add to the mix, there are various outfits to find for the Guardians: from their different iterations. I always switched the respective character to use the newly found one. And as a result, my party looked even more a random.

In addition to the cool locations, another visual detail I did like were character faces, especially their eyes. There's something uncanny about them but they do look like they're really looking at you, even the alien species. I thought that was impressive.

Garbage tier mouse & keyboard controls

Combat in the game can be quite hectic. Most of the time, you control the abilities of five characters at once, and each of them will eventually have whole four of them. I don't think the combat is particularly challenging; even hard is smooth going as long as you keep utilizing the abilities.

I have to say though that Guardians should be played on a controller if possible: mouse and keyboard controls were clearly an afterthought and would still need fixing. I didn't have a controller plugged in at the time and was feeling too lazy to go behind my desk to attach the cable. But I really should have done that the moment actual problems became apparent.

Since I didn't even try a controller, I don't know how it is to use all the abilities on one, but I do know that by the end of the game my left hand was often close to cramping from constantly going through all the 20 different abilities on keyboard. It doesn't help that Guardians seems to have some issue that makes it sometimes not register your input, making you hammer buttons more than should be necessary.

Another issue appeared during the bits you get to control Peter's Milano ship. Like in Far Cry 5's fishing minigame, this one treats mouse input as simulated analog stick in those scenes. When the mouse stops moving, the game reads that as if you had let go of the stick. Crash landing the Milano was extremely difficult for me due to that, having to wave my mouse around like a madman once I understood what was going on.

Soundtrack from the '80s

One of the game's features is a long list of licensed 1980's hit songs, apparently inspired by the 2014 film's depiction of Peter's likings. You can play all the songs while on the ship but they're also playable in combat when using Huddle, which is sort of a second wind ability, Peter motivating the team to keep going. I think the music helped with boosting people's perception of the game. I didn't enjoy it that much although I have to say that it's pretty unique to have Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley playing during a final boss fight.

It was amusing to watch this game being streamed when the streamer had enabled streaming mode, which disables all the licensed music to prevent the streams and VODs being DMCA claimed by the music's rights holders. Instead of the licensed songs, there is nothing, which kind of hurts the experience. To help with the game's marketing, they could have used the game's original soundtrack for the huddle moments: Guardians has a full album's worth of music made for the imaginary Star-Lord band. I'd say that was a slight oversight by the developers.

Too long

Like I mentioned, the game is linear. There are however many cul-de-sacs along the way, where the outfits and other collectibles as well as crafting resources are hidden. I evidently missed quite a few because I barely got the achievement for finding half the collectibles. I reckon a lot of those were in Knowhere which I kind of rushed through on the first visit.

Resources I did find aplenty though: I immediately got the upgrade that alerts you when there's materials nearby. I had everything maxed well before the end of the game and had to do many fights with nothing left to improve. That made them feel pointless. I think in general Guardians has too many encounters. They're not interesting enough to be that numerous. There are surprisingly long walking simulator sections as well and those felt outright unnecessary padding.

I had tried this game a few months back already out of curiosity to see if it would run on a GTX 970 despite the listed minimum requirements being at least 6GB VRAM. The answer was a crystal clear no: I got a literal slideshow of 1 frame per second on the minimum settings the game allowed. I do wonder though if that is the usual experience when a GPU has to swap between VRAM and RAM, or was that an especially bad case caused by the GTX 970 having to use its last, slow-ass 500MB, absolutely wrecking performance. Guardians seemed to take about 4.5GB VRAM on 1080p on the lower of the whole two texture settings. The game's graphical options are a bit lacking to say the least -- no Nixxes to make a PC port after they were snagged by Sony.