Eidos-Montreal’s Guardians of the Galaxy was one of E3 2021’s biggest surprises. I’m a huge MCU fan and the reveal trailer did a great job of showcasing the Guardians we know and love - even if they aren’t dead ringers for their MCU equivalents. I don’t care if Star-Lord looks like Chris Pratt or Jake Paul as long as he’s still the butt of Rocket’s jokes.
From the initial trailer, it really seemed like the game had already nailed the characters, and after spending some time exploring the Milano, it’s clear that the Eidos has nailed the personalities of the Guardians. The only thing that gave me pause was the combat, which looked stiff and awkward at first glance. Now that I’ve had the chance to finally get my hands on it, I’m still not sold on its bizarre command-driven battle system.
Star-Lord is not a heavyweight on the battlefield by any stretch of the imagination. His pistols barely even tickle enemies, and his punches are slow and often fail to connect. You’d imagine that tossing a bare-knuckle punch at Nova Corps’ armor would probably hurt you more than it hurts them, and that’s exactly what it feels like to run around throwing hands as Peter Quill. His one saving grace is an elemental ammo type that freezes enemies in place, but what’s he going to do once they’re frozen? Playing Star-Lord feels like a game of tag, and all of the bad guys are It.
Since Quill is essentially useless, his real job is telling the other Guardians what to do. As you might imagine, Drax and Gamora are formidable on the battlefield, capable of unleashing devastating single-target and AOE attacks. Groot can root enemies to the ground and bash them with powerful swings of his tree-trunk arms. Rocket’s got plenty of tricks up his sleeves too, including a bomb with a huge attack radius that can knock down multiple foes at once. Guardians of the Galaxy is all about figuring out how to work together as a team, and the combat system leans heavily on that theme. Unfortunately, the mechanics of controlling your teammates leave a lot to be desired.
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While dodging around the arena as Star-Lord, you can aim at an enemy and command your teammates to attack them. Different abilities have different damage and stagger values, as well as different target sizes, so if you want to be a good leader you have to learn to use the right attack at the right time. That sounds like a perfectly engaging system for a turn-based RPG, but in a third-person action game, all that menu navigation has a huge impact on the pace of combat.
I have always hated radial menus that slow down the action. The Arkham series did a great job of mapping all of Batman’s gadgets to button combos so that combat always felt kinetic and fluid, but then Marvel’s Spider-Man took a huge step back by making you pause the game to choose your gadgets in the middle of a fight. In Doom Eternal, I would rather draw any random gun than open that radial menu to select one. I hate the way menus interrupt the flow of combat, and if I could avoid using them entirely, I would. Because Star-Lord is a commander more than a fighter, the menu navigation in Guardians is almost constant - which in turn makes it a constant pain.
What I played was a very small piece of a much bigger game, and I’m hopeful that unlocking new abilities will cut back on all the time I spent flitting between menus. Even if things do become more manageable, however, you’ll still have to contend with the huddle, a mid-battle dialogue mini-game where the entire team groups up for a pep talk from Coach Star-Lord. The mechanic is intrusive and, from my short experience, breaks the flow of combat in a major way. I hope that, like Kena: Bridge of Spirits, the combat in Guardians just takes a while to get good. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s likely going to be the most divisive thing about the game.