Late To The Party: Guardians Of The Galaxy

I recently finished up the GotG videogame, and I feel decidedly mixed about it. 

On the one hand, the story is solid and the characters are engaging to interact with. They have something to say and a point of view about things. They also repeat themselves a bit, which is unfortunate but I understand why that might happen: Most players probably aren't like me, trying to squeeze every ounce of dialog and character from stories. Redundancies matter if players can skip parts.

As far as the gameplay goes, I can say that I was starting to get the hang of things, learning to combo skills to accomplish the fighting set pieces by the end of the game. But there's a frantic, lightspattered visual element to combat made it challenging to see what was going on.

I died multiple times because I couldn't tell where I was being attacked from and had no sense of what my health was at.

But most disappointing was the failure of GotG to build that gameplay into one where I had to utilize the skills I'd earned and developed in ways that made me feel strategic and smart about the boss fights. 

Instead, I was stuck with old tropes like: This final boss has a triple healthbar and a regenerating shield or Your health bar has been reduced to a fraction. 

That last one was particularly annoying because there was no story reason for that to happen. They just did it to make that fight hard.

So instead of me using skill to navigate these challenges, it was all about endurance and how long I could get lucky. That lead to some frustrating moments-moments they threw in at the end of the game, because by then, they've gotcha, right? You still want to finish this game you sunk 20ish hours into, right?? 

Similarly: quick time events are bullshit. Stop that. But this kind of gameplay issue is the problem I had with the Uncharted series: You don't do something cool that you learned to win. You just QTE yourself into a victory. 

Which is frustrating because there are some cool kernels of play: the huddle mechanic was neat, and I wish there had been more opportunities to fail it. I don't mean that I want to fail it-the game wants you to have a cool moment with a soundtrack as you and your team rally to win. Who doesn't want that?

But it was too easy to read the team and my responses always hit a very similar theme-almost always "stay calm and focus and we'll get 'em!" which...OK sure. Say that 7 times though and maybe it's getting a little old. Maybe if it had been difficult in the early part of the game and got easier as you spoke to and learned about your teammates, that would've been rad. 

I would have loved to have Groot speak in a huddle and have to intuit what to say based on the tone and cadence of his words. That would've made me feel accomplished!

The other highlight is the story which I enjoyed. It gave me moments where the things I said mattered to the rest of the game. Those things always seemed small but they didn't feel unimportant. 

Plus, the story had some consequences for the characters involved and resolving things mattered. The game has to give space for a grieving character and does so. This is something I feel the MCU hasn't done very well lately, so it was a nice change of pace to have this be a thing and have it be important.