ゲームを楽しもう!

GOTG is easily one of the years biggest surprises for me and it's a game i originally never even intended to play. any time it came up in a square enix showcase i would just brush it off as being boring, that it was taking up way too much time and that it was a complete waste of the talents of crystal dynamics. a team i would have work on a new tomb raider instead. this wasn't fair to it. i was just super put off by marvel stuff at the time. it shouldn't shock anyone to know that i do not care for the MCU and what it's done to the media landscape, I've never even seen a marvel movie but what i knew of them was enough for me to write them off and in turn write this game off. that was how i felt at the time and it hasn't changed beyond me just not caring enough to get mad at it anymore, they're not for me and that's fine. i shouldn't have pushed that mindset onto this game though. not only is it completely unrelated to those movies or even the other square enix marvel game (which i actually did play and enjoy), it's also just a fantastic game and one of the better action games I've played this generation. i really liked this one, though my recommendation for it does come with some small asterisks.

the story is i think the big reason to play. while the rest of the game is very solid, the story is the big draw to make you stick with it. the core dynamic between the team is so well written and well handled that it's something i could easily recommend the game on based on just that. it's the kind of thing that just makes these characters enjoyable to be around and their dynamic feels natural and dynamic. it doesn't feel forced. it's shocking too, i didn't expect it from a licenced marvel game, i expected it to be like spiderman and be kind of blandly written, quippy and nothingy but i found myself loving this core cast and getting super invested in their stories. i loved this cast. they trash talk each other a lot but it's fun to see them grow to care about each other as the game goes on and i really wanted to seek out the little trinkets you can find in order to hear more about the cast's backstories. all the little interactions they have in levels are almost all funny and i always sought them out, there's so many variations too for if you make different story choices, say different things in dialogue or even in what order you do things like finding hidden side paths or if you do puzzle solutions in the wrong order or even how well you do in some parts can change dialogue, like if you lose the shooting minigame to rocket or if you manage to get certain characters on your side when the game tallies up certain choices. there's a really seriously impressive amount of dialogue here and very little of it is wasted or poorly written. the story they're involved in is also very good and it has a really impressive sense of scale to it with just how much of the galaxy you end up seeing. the place feels so well realized for its runtime. it gets super personal and emotional too. it's not just a funny game, it actually managed to make me cry a few times near the end in some of those flashback dream sequences or the sections on earth with starlord as a teen. the psychic space cult is a cool idea for a villain and there's tons of fun side characters you get to meet along the way, highlights for me were the psychic dog that runs a smuggler city, mantis who is probably the games funniest character with her knowing of all of these really funny alternate timelines and confusing the rest of the cast with them or a cool warrior queen you spend most of the game on the run from after a really funny heist gone wrong. even the family drama with the main character ended up working for me when i really didn't expect it to, the game manages to handle its dramatic scenes impressively well for a game with this much humour and i think the contrast between that humour and those dark moments really makes both parts stand out so much better.

the gameplay reminds me a lot of something like dirge of Cerberus, EX troopers or megaman legends. it's a third person shooter with less of a focus on precise aim and more of a focus on dodging and resource management. you get a super generous auto-aim lock on, some cooldowns with things like a machinegun shot or a burst or flight and you have teammates with their own cooldowns that you have to work into combos along with your own. you dodge and fly around the battlefield away from enemy attacks and keep an eye on your active reload thingy that can end combos with an explosion. your teammates can bind enemies, juggle them in the air or just do massive damage. these cooldowns can also be shortened with this games version of a burst mode. here you do a huddle with your party and have to pick the correct dialogue option, if you do this you get almost instant cooldowns for a while and the games licenced OST kicks in for a while. it's really cool and it's where the combat felt at its most fun. it works perfectly with the team focused energy of the story and it ends with you very quickly developing a bond with them mechanically. it's just fun too, it's not as deep or fast as something like max payne or stranglehold but it's got depth and i like how different it feels from other shooters these days, though with the games length and the inability to directly control other teammates it does get boring after a while. i had my character maxxed around 3/4 of the way into the game and the tactics i used didn't really change much with the harder enemies to stop the combat from getting really stale by the end. i think letting you control those other characters would have done a lot to give the game the variety it needs. that does bring me to the big thing about this game that may dissuade some people. this game is long, even by cinematic action games. it's a good 15-17 hours and it feels it. it drags on pretty badly with slow walking segments and levels that feel at least half an hour too long each, the places you go always have amazing variety and are really pretty and the story is consistently good and funny throughout but the combat more or less wraps up in complexity halfway in and by the 2/3rds point i just wanted the game to end already. it can be a total slog for the sake of being long and i do think it drags down what is an otherwise amazing experience. the game is at least not very difficult. it's beatable for most people at most skill levels and it's very accessible in terms of how it plays, so even if you're an action game novice i think you would have a good time here, since stuff like aiming is taken care of for you with that lock on. there's not much gameplay vareity beyond this though, a lot of walking and talking segments and some hub towns are basically all you get. those towns are fun to explore though and you can even spend money and see some side areas if you explore enough.

the game is very pretty, it might even be one of the best looking games of the gen so far. the characters all look good and are super well designed. i thought rocket, groot and gamora were the standouts but the rest of the crew look good too and you have a ton of cool costumes you can pick up for the characters if you don't like those base designs. best part is that none of those costumes are DLC, they're all just unlockable throughout the story mode! the NPC's don't look to bad either. i loved how the space cops looked and the cool dog and there's tons of cool monsters and alien species dotted around to admire too. the levels are the standout though. there's a cool hub ship you can talk to teammates and listen to music on, huge cyberpunk cities, snow planets, rainy mushroom worlds, a cool quarantined spaceship covered in pink stuff, megachurches, cool crystally desert planets and even a chunk that takes place in the skull of a dead god(?) thingy. though sadly not all of the game is as good looking as that, there are a lot of fairly bland, if pretty, spaceships in here too. those tend to drag a little and blend together after a while.

now the music is one of the best parts of the game, though sadly not the games original score. which is disappointing! since this game is scored by the legendary Richard Jacques. you might not know his name but you know his work. games like sonic R, 3D blast and generations, the club, metropolis street racer, jet set radio, headhunter and Daytona USA. it's a very cinematic score though, closer to his work on something like battle stations midway or conflict denied ops. it works for the game and it's not a bad score but it just doesn't give me much to work with personally. there's some original tracks here from the band "star lord" which were fully original to the game and they're mostly pretty good, though i find the licenced 80's music more my speed. there's a ton of amazing stuff there. A-HA, blondie, blue oyster cult, rick Astley, tears for fears and a bunch more. they only play on your ship and during your ultimate mode outside of some very specific scripted segments but it's a really good selection and it did a lot for me.

if you want to play the game it's very common and not very expensive. a physical copy will run you anywhere from £10-20 and if you're lucky you can get it even cheaper than that. it's also on almost every platform currently out, it's only missing the switch and switch 2. i played it on PS5 and it worked fantastically. the game was made by a former favourite studio of mine, crystal dynamics! back when i played and finished this i would have told you that they were easily one of the best western studios out there. their output was consistently great and i was super excited for their future. sadly now they're out there shilling AI tech in the new tomb raider game and wasting all good will i had for them. makes me almost glad we aren't getting a sequel to this. as a studio they're known for games like soul reaver, blood omen, the tomb raider series post-core designs leaving, gex, mad dash racing and the square enix avengers game. they have talent and i liked all of those games, even avengers, which i will one day cover. this is the better of their marvel titles though. the characters from the game also showed up in another PS4 game but this one was by telltale and was based more on the movies, where this was more of an original take. that gams has long since been delisted and isn't easy to play anymore, though i have seen some people online say the games disc version works fine these days. it's connection to the movies makes me mostly uninterested in it though, I'm just not into that. you can play as a few members of the cast in MVC3 and infinite though as well as the upcoming tokon and that i do care about. this version is probably dead in the water, i can't see it getting any future sequels, which is a huge shame since i enjoyed the game a lot. though never say never, the game is getting an upcoming switch 2 port seemingly so if that does well then, well, we can only hope. i do hope so, because this was a real surprise and it's something that i think would work with a sequel that shows off more of the galaxy and gives the game a tighter pace and better gameplay variety. there's a ton of potential here.