Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy review

I did not expect to root for Guardians of the Galaxy this much. It was weighed down by so many stagnant vibes during its pre-release cycle. The shadow of Marvel’s Avengers, Square Enix’s 2020 attempt to transmute the total media superiority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into a living co-op videogame, loomed particularly large. That game’s cast of Hollywood facsimiles—all of these fake Chris Hemsworths—left customers ice cold, and while the core narrative was decent, nobody enjoyed the meaningless currency grind.

Guardians comes from the same publisher and appears to be made of the same stock, except that this time, it’s a singleplayer-only campaign and the player is restricted to the least interesting member of the troupe, Star-Lord. There is a pervasive focus-tested coldness that corrodes so many products that bear the Marvel name in 2021, and I wasn’t optimistic that Eidos Montreal would be capable of overcoming the taint.

That is until I solved a puzzle involving a psychedelic space llama who I needed to coax into chewing up some wires on the ship. The beast was either enchanted or repelled by each crewmember’s singing voice—he’d come closer to Star-Lord’s melody, run away from Rocket Raccoon’s, and so on—so we all took turns belting out Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” until our mercurial llama was finally in place. Guardians is full of sequences that capture the odder, funnier, lighter side of Marvel’s cosmic expanse. I ran into a Soviet test-flight golden retriever blessed with celestial hyper-intelligence, and in a moment of weakness, he admitted to me how much he missed his former puny dog-intellect, those endless afternoons chasing tennis balls in the front lawn. There’s a fourth-wall-breaking left-hook, taken right out of the Arkham playbook, tying to an amazing twist that caught me hilariously off-guard. Hell, deep into the game’s final acts, I watched as the permanently chaffed Rocket Raccoon faced his one lingering trauma thanks to the encouragement and support of his teammates. The scene worked as a better emotional payoff than anything I’ve seen the character do on film. Guardians of the Galaxy has its heart in the right place… if only the game itself weren’t constantly sabotaging those efforts with exhausting technical jank.

Like Avengers before it, Guardians of the Galaxy is steeped deep in the character-action tradition. You take control of Star-Lord, as I mentioned earlier, and unload an endless stream of photon beams at all the toothy beasties, corrupt interplanetary cops, and deranged cult leaders that stand in your way. A bar on the left side of the screen fills up as the player deals damage, punctuated with Marvel-fied versions of those vintage Devil May Cry descriptors—”Marvelous!” “Uncanny!” The remaining Guardians come into play with your unlockable special power rolodex. I could ask Groot to bind my enemies to the floor with his roots, or summon up Drax for an earth-shattering ground pound. But outside of those instances, your fellow superheroes are relegated to the nameless faces that tend to populate Call of Duty levels, offering the faint image of warfighting solidarity, without actually doing anything all that productive.

It gets the job done. The combat isn’t where Guardians of the Galaxy shines, but it is both flashy enough and simple enough to sustain some of the more active portions of the plot. I found that the villain-fighting got more engaging the closer I came to the game’s conclusion. In the beginning, armed with only a pair of pea-shooters and a handful of basic attacks, Guardians is a shooting gallery with no pulse. But when you’re popping off multiple cooldowns at once and enjoying a fully optimized arsenal, the design gets close to that overwhelming, splash-panel, polychromatic eye candy that is so often prioritized in the films. Lasers, bombs, swords, and Drax flying in off the top rope like a punishing Marvel vs Capcom assist. One of the best features in Guardians of the Galaxy is its “Huddle Up” function. Every once in a while you can call the team together, offer some words of encouragement, and re-enter the fray with a damage buff cued to a pulpy ’80s classic pulled from the game’s trove of licensed material. (I heard Gary Numan’s “Cars,” Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.”) It is genuinely incandescent.

The story here is centered around the usual universe-threatening Marvel disaster. There’s some sort of hyper-religious stellar church corrupting the minds of the Andromeda Galaxy. Our motley crew is here to stop it, even as the odds continue to pile up against us. The Guardians might be a roving batch of greedy malcontents, but at least they’ve got a heart of gold.