Both Marvel-related games were published by popular video game company, Square Enix. Both games did have different developers working on them. Marvel’s Avengers was made by Crystal Dynamics and Guardians of the Galaxy was made by Eidos-Montréal.
Almost everyone knows that Marvel’s Avengers was a flop. It’s even got to the point now where even Spider-Man’s introduction into the game cannot save it. The game did so many things wrong where even the bits they got right were completely outshined.
The game had untapped potential but for me, the thing they did wrong immediately was put the game down a looter-shooter type game. Although those types of games do tend to maintain some form of longevity, the ultimate consensus is that they do often become repetitive bores. Marvel’s Avengers was so no different.
Then Guardians of the Galaxy was announced. I myself just eye-rolled at the thought of it. After the state of Avenger’s, I had zero faith in Square Enix to even publish a good game.
Oh boy, I was wrong. Our co-founder, Phil Weaver reviewed the game on release and had a shining response to how good the game was. I was still in disbelief and honestly, I didn’t believe his review was truthful. Speaking of being truthful, I just put him down to being a fanboy.
It’s definitely been one hell of an experience. I’m roughly 12 hours in and I’ve already had a blast with this. You only get to control Star-Lord but it’s such a blast. The quirky mechanics that involve you make it immersive especially considering you get to control aspects of a conversation or control what abilities the other Guardians use when you’re in battle.
You get 4 different elements for the guns which you unlock over the course of the story, each Guardian has 4 abilities you can use in battle, you also get your own set of 4 abilities, plus using the guns and also fighting in hand-to-hand combat which is surprisingly satisfying.
Honestly, this is more down to opinion but they’ve done the characters so well that some of them are better in the game than they in the actual movies. Drax and Mantis are two standouts compared to their movie counterparts, especially Drax.
We see Drax the Destroyer in a much better and serious light with comedy still sprinkled in. We often forget that Drax was created to be the one to kill Thanos. In the Avengers films when they come up against him, he does a grand total of nothing in the fight against Thanos. Don’t get me wrong, I like Drax in the movies but I think he’s just become a circus character now more than a destroyer.
All the voice acting is done superbly. It’s actually impressive that at times you forget you’re playing a game. All it made me do was want to watch the Guardians of the Galaxy movies again on Disney+.
It does seem like the developers cared a lot for this project, even despite many people not being sure about it. They could have easily gone down an open-world RPG-type game and blown it up with microtransactions, but they didn’t. They went down a linear single-player experience with this type of game. It was a very risky move but one I feel they pulled off. Why? Because unlike Avengers. They cared for the player’s experience instead of being greedy and predatory.
£15+ for a single Iron Man suit is ridiculous.
Even down to the easter eggs in Guardians as well. At one point you go through this multiverse type thing with a hand guiding you through. In this scene, you hear Captain America say “Avengers assemble”, with jokes by Star-Lord right after. We get teases for Peter Parker and Hulk, not to mention the other easter eggs throughout the game itself. Including Moon Dragon.
Guardians of the Galaxy is the game Marvel’s Avengers should have been. If you speak to many people who played Avengers, they often tell you the campaign was quite good, it was interesting. If they just expanded on that, maybe kept the cooperative experience in the game it would have been far more successful.
Not every single game that’s released needs to be 100+ hours. Games can still be successful without it. Take God of War, Spider-Man, Last of Us, Jedi: Fallen Order, and more. These have all been immensely successful. You’d think with the Avengers name slapped on the front of the game it would sell well, but unfortunately, it’s not the case. You still need to make an effort to make a good game.
Even if Avengers was a linear (despite Spider-Man being an open-world game) experience then that’s fine. All the games I mentioned I’ve played and completed more than once. It just shows that maybe if Avengers put the effort in the same way Guardians did then it wouldn’t be such a mess right now.
If anything, I don’t hear anybody really talk about Avengers anymore it’s just done. It never helped that the developers were increasing the need for more XP to level up, higher costs to purchase suits with next to no creativity on modes, I can’t say I’m surprised at all.
