One of the cult's first victims? A girl who may or may not be Star-Lord's illegitimate child. The broad-strokes didn't interest me much, but Guardians does a good job integrating the uber-high stakes into the cloistered anxieties of the heroes themselves. The Guardians might be a roving batch of greedy malcontents, but at least they've got a heart of gold. Our motley crew is here to stop it, even as the odds continue to pile up against us. There's some sort of hyper-religious stellar church corrupting the minds of the Andromeda Galaxy. The story here is centered around the usual universe-threatening Marvel disaster. (I heard Gary Numan's "Cars," Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," Soft Cell's "Tainted Love.") It is genuinely incandescent. 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. One of the best features in Guardians of the Galaxy is its "Huddle Up" function. Lasers, bombs, swords, and Drax flying in off the top rope like a punishing Marvel vs Capcom assist. 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. 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. I found that the villain-fighting got more engaging the closer I came to the game's conclusion. 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. 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.
I could ask Groot to bind my enemies to the floor with his roots, or summon up Drax for an earth-shattering ground pound. 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. 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. Like Avengers before it, Guardians of the Galaxy is steeped deep in the character-action tradition.
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Guardians of the Galaxy has its heart in the right placeā¦ if only the game itself weren't constantly sabotaging those efforts with exhausting technical jank. The scene worked as a better emotional payoff than anything I've seen the character do on film. 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. 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. 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.
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Guardians is full of sequences that capture the odder, funnier, lighter side of Marvel's cosmic expanse. 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. 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.