It presents like a PS3 game although it often looks fucking stunning (still really novel to see something look this good and run at 60fps as a non-PC guy) on PS5. The gameplay isn't all that complicated but sometimes the game is sometimes weirdly hard, and sometimes the combos feel sneaky good, but overall it mostly feels like it's getting in the way of the story.

But then the story is all over the place too, with pacing issues abound (especially in the live, in-game ongoing conversations that never end and often get cut off by your progress in the level) and all kinds of macguffins and deus ex machinas almost every chapter. Quill comes off like a Ninja Turtle and Rocket feels like he's going for every character from Mean Streets all at once, but then sometimes the voice acting and animation just hits and you're like MAN this is good - especially Drax stuff. And then other times it's like we've learned nothing since the stilted days of Fallout 3 conversations.

I've mostly been really enjoying it because I'm a sucker for this Sony formula of sorta-guided, kinda-charming single player campaigns (the closest analog is Uncharted with dashes of Final Fantasy XV and Mass Effect: Andromeda) but it's really interesting to see a major studio get so close on so many different aspirations and fall just short of nearly all of them in both charming and super annoying ways.

If you dislike the property or have soured on the Marvel interpretation of them I'd wait for a sale, though, because it definitely needs you to care even a little bit about what you know about these characters from their MCU runs (despite being wholly unrelated) and they definitely aren't shying away from trying to ape James Gunn's style.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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