But each room inevitably funnels into a hallway leading you to the next exhibit. You can take your time in each individual room, soaking in the sights while still adhering to the “look, don’t touch” policy. In many ways, my time in Guardians feels like spending the afternoon in a rad museum. Completing the game feels like a very surmountable task, as opposed to so many games nowadays where you open a menu only to find an endless checklist of tasks and collectables that require treating the game like a part-time job in order to ever fully complete.

And despite that chapter in the celestial city unfolding in different ways depending on your actions, you ultimately always end up at the same place. The game moves on a fairly linear path throughout its 16 chapters, only occasionally tossing you into a small sandbox like the winding streets and back alleys of Knowhere. And this is one of the things that I admire most about Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But at the same time, I miss the days of being able to jump in, crank through a 10-hour adventure over the course of a long weekend, and roll credits feeling like I’ve experienced a majority of what the game had to show me. Whether you’re pillaging your way through Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or saving New York City in Insomniac’s Spider-Man, it feels like a good chunk of time in modern games is spent tabbing through a never-ending Cheesecake Factory menu of options.Īnd that’s okay! I love a lot of those games, they tend to provide a lot more hours-per-dollar-spent, and I totally understand if that’s an important factor for many folks. This modern glut of skills, abilities, stats, cosmetics, side-quests, and various ways to grow your character that were once reserved for only the most hardcore of RPGs are now commonplace in nearly every type of action adventure game. I’m not trying to point fingers at who’s responsible for making so many modern AAA games gravitate towards elements of sprawling open-world action-RPGs, because frankly, I don’t think I have enough fingers to go around.

In fact, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy feels like a relic of a bygone era that I actually kind of miss - namely, the single-player adventures that seemed plentiful on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But lo and behold, Eidos-Montreal’s take on the now-iconic intergalactic heroes is actually pretty damn great thanks to its fantastic writing, strong sense of adventure, and roller coaster momentum. After a fairly lukewarm reveal during E3, it felt like the game was released to little hype, fanfare, and backing from Square Enix. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the most delightfully surprising video games of 2021.

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