Developer Eidos Montreal’s take on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy brings us one of the very best story-driven games of 2021 – and it’s great to see Square-Enix pivot back firmly to a single-player action game. There’s no multiplayer, no online, not even co-op – and refreshingly, there’s not the slightest hint of the ‘games as a service’ concept that sat so uneasily with Marvel’s Avengers. It’s all about you, playing as Peter Quill aka Star-Lord, haphazardly adventuring through a well-scripted story, chapter by chapter. Based on the Dawn Engine, as used in Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Guardians of the Galaxy is a genuine treat, but how does it play out on the new wave of consoles?
First off, I really want to stress that Guardians of the Galaxy is a genuine surprise, an exceptional game and a visual tour-de-force. It often looks stunning – and that starts with the locations. The Quarantine Zone, a planet of derelict machinery fused with a pink crystalline gel, is a perfect backdrop for the Guardians’ first mission. Materials come out beautifully in the midday sun. Light shafts seep from behind pillars of dense scrapyard tech, giving the world a rich, opulent look. Lighting also brings out the sharp, specular layer on the pink rubble, a lot of which is destructible. All round, there’s a heavy art-driven approach to each area and every set-piece. Later planets have wildly different biomes, of course. The second mission puts us under rainy, scorched skies, for example, while wind physics affect foliage. It’s a battle against the elements as we hop between moss-covered islands – where again, material work is stand-out.
In short, the game looks very good. Extremely good in fact, marred only by a slight lack of polish. For example, you can’t overlook some bugs that have crept in at launch. These include obvious streaming stutters, notably while flying into the first planet. There are lighting quirks during camera transitions, as the buffer fades in and out across characters. Animations snap awkwardly while crawling, or climbing over objects too. All combined, these quirks distract a little from the strong production values of the rest of the package. Patches were rolling out even during the process of reviewing the game, so maybe we’ll see some improvement – and hopefully that will extend to an uneven performance mode found in the Series X and PS5 versions of the game.