Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

 Who?

The Square Enix conference might have ended off with a surprising dud to the face, (that I've already covered in another Chaos strewn blog) but it started with a big and surprising reveal which I certainly didn't anticipate. Well... I mean it was actually leaked before the conference, but I tend not to pay attention to that sort of stuff so it was new to me. However, the surprise perhaps shouldn't be too great because as we've already seen the Marvel folks have been wanting to get into the multibillion dollar gaming pie for a while now, so it was only a matter of time before they shot down their list of marketable heroes. First the Avengers were pimped out to Square Enix for a game so bad that recently the development team patched in a bug that temporary showed player IP addresses on the screen (basically doxxing any streamers of the game) but it didn't even make front page news because hardly anyone streams or watches it nowadays. Well this time the guys over at Marvel are committed to get their brand's money worth now that they've trusted their value IP to... oh, Square Enix again? Huh... feels like there was a lesson to learn here that was a little ignored...

But you know, I love a few choice Square Enix games out there, so I'm sure the unfortunate case of Avengers was just a one off. Maybe they can really nail that great Marvel game we're all looking for now that they've got Marvel's second most beloved family under their wing; The Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah, do you remember how popular those guys were? James Gunn took this relative unknown super hero team and turned them into household names with enduring character writing, near perfect casting choices and some solid action scenes. The first movie was great, I think the second movie was better and I'm sure the third is going to be special too. But can that heart and soul successfully carry over to the video gaming world? It certainly didn't save the Telltale Guardians of the Galaxy game which, despite gaining good reviews, didn't manage to set the world on fire like previous Telltale games had. (God rest their soul. And give praise in the name of the resurrection. I really can't figure out what's going on with Telltale nowadays.)

This is a completely different approach to Guardians of the Galaxy, however, not an interactive narrative choice based game but rather a single player action game, which is exactly the sort of dumb stimulation my dumb monkey brain is looking for. Honestly, that was one of the things that Avengers was actually good at, throwing you in an arena and letting you feel like a badass for a little while, and something that unabashedly caters to feeding the power fantasies of gamers is somewhat missing in today's market when you really think about it. It's all mostly given to looter shooters which are more preoccupied with making players obsess over stat values by gradually turning up some arbitrary difficulty valve, when was the last time an action game just focused on making you the hero and nothing else? Okay, there's probably at least one huge example I'm missing- Ghost of Tsushima! Duh...Well, that was an exclusive, this game is for everyone, thus it'll be great, no?

Well, it looks pretty interesting at least. Being based on a superhero team, fans might be expecting the chance to shoot big guns as Rocket Racoon, pick up and chuck folks around as Groot or get all medieval as Drax, but instead we're stuck with playing only Peter Quill. Which is fine. Quill is the leader of the group and his human story is meant to be the audience's window into the world of wonder of bemusement, thus he was going to play a centrale part of the game anyway. It just sort of feels like a missed opportunity is all, something that Avengers didn't even miss out on. I mean, there's something detached about playing a brawler game where all you do is fly around the battlefield and fire blasters at people whilst your team do the heavy lifting. I mean sure, that's the exact role I try to play in every MMO I've ever played ever, but I like when it's my choice to play the hands off coward, getting forced into it feels restrictive.

That being said I will say that there's something interesting about playing the group leader in an active combat sceanrio, I just hope that comes off a lot more involved then pressing attacks prompts when meters fill because otherwise I wonder about the thesis behind this combat set-up. It's strange, from the gameplay we saw, and there was some extended gameplay here, you appear to be playing the least weighty role out of your entire team and are just have really floaty ranged attacks that lack any of the oomph of even some of the better third person shooters out there. I thought things would get better once the super flashy ultra mode was activated, but that just buffed the damage outputs whilst playing old copyrighted music (get it, because that's Quill's thing!); kind of making it one of the disappointing ultra modes I've seen in a while. I'm not saying that I want Dark Souls level of connection with every swing I throw, but if your entire gameplay loop is built around shooting maybe you'd at least make that shooting somewhat punchier? Am I being unreasonable here? Maybe I'm not giving it the dues.

Admittedly, my criticism is based on solely what I can see from pre-release demo footage and maybe that's one huge misnomer and the game feels crisp in the hand. (I doubt it, but maybe.) But that's secondary anyway when you consider that what a Guardians game really needs to conquer is the banter between the party members, as the Chris Pratt led ensemble movie really set a high bar to meet. This game tries to lean more on the comic influences than the film, but given that the recent versions of the comics are themselves inspired by the films, everything sort of wraps back around the James Gunn way. And thus we will come to the rather unfair comparison of dialogue writing between movie and game, a battle that's unwinnable. We actually saw a very extended chat with the team in this trailer demo and I can say this much; it didn't flow as well as the movie, but I still thought the team dynamic was there. I could tell how much they hated each other, which fits with the setting being hardly a year into their journeys together, and the rivalry seems like set up for some decent lategame camaraderie to offset it and show growth. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but servable.

The real problem with this game in my eyes, and the reason it stood out like a sore thumb on the E3 stage, was the look of the game; I mean what was going on there? The artistic intent behind the alien world in the gameplay was fine, and I appreciated the grandiose and fantastical sense of scale, but it was the raw graphical quality letting everything down. Why did this look like a last gen game in a conference season dedicated to the next gen? I mean one might say the same about Elden Ring, but that's a game looking to revolutionise that entire development company's approach to game design in their most ambitious project to date, this is just a single player brawler. I can't comprehend why the visuals looked so low resolution, it's bizarre to me. My only guess is that the team didn't prepare PS5/Series X footage for some reason, but then that just makes them lazy and silly. Of course, graphics never make a game, but they do form the first impression and this impression left a dour imprint.

With it being just around the corner, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy doesn't really look like a game with the sort of polish that one is looking for to wash the taste of Avengers out of your mouth. In fact, Avengers kind of still looks more fun than this game. Which isn't to say I couldn't be totally wrong. The devs did a grand job of selling their dedication to bringing the Guardians to life, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that the raw prospect of more Marvel team games doesn't make me all giddy on the inside, but my gut just won't settle for me on this one. Call me a pessimist, but I'm just not falling for Square's sale pitch this time, I don't see this game being the smash hit that this licence deserves, and if my gut is right that'll be two strikes against Marvel in a row. We can't let Marvel be chased out of the industry again, I need more superhero games! So maybe from a stew of lukewarm ingredients this game can pull a Ratatouille style miracle under the chef's hat with a smash hit masterpiece. Fingers crossed for a game not nearly as mediocre as it looks.