I’ll get to why the characters are such a rousing success, but the narrative pacing here is off. Along the way, they’ll contend with the Nova Corp, Lady Hellbender herself, and a fanatical church hellbent on enslaving the galaxy. Instead, things go sideways and the team finds themselves having to scramble to set things right. It all starts when the team is searching the Quarantine Zone to find an animal worthy of selling to the feared Lady Hellbender, a warlord who has her own monster preserve. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy takes over 20 hours to tell a fairly simple tale: Star-Lord accidentally frees something that ends up allowing a church to threaten the entire galaxy. The game’s narrative can drag and it honestly goes on too long, but it’s such a joy to spend time with this version of the cast that the occasional missteps don’t distract much from the wacky space adventure. But I was confident that the folks at Eidos could build a narrative backbone and cast of characters that do this franchise justice. Having the team behind the last couple of Deus Ex games was certainly a surprising choice. If Eidos-Montréal didn’t get those right, the entire game would miss the mark. Whether or not Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy would work always hinged on the characters.
