The Epic Games Store has unveiled one of those “oh crap, what’s my Epic account password again?” weekly free games: Eidos Montreal’s excellent 2021 adaptation of Guardians of the Galaxy. The promotion started today, and runs through next Wednesday, January 10.
Coming on the heels of Crystal Dynamics’ much-maligned Avengers live service game, Guardians was a bit of a surprise as a high-quality single player campaign. It’s one of those triple-A videogames everybody always says they want: a reasonable length at 15 hours or so, with all that Disney budget going into the story and set pieces.
Despite releasing with myriad performance issues and glitches, Guardians cleaned up its act enough by the end of 2021 to snag one of our Game of the Year awards for Best Characters. Writing at the time, PCG staff writer Morgan Park called it “basically an Uncharted game with better characters,” while online editor Fraser Brown praised it as “an incredibly entertaining jaunt through colourful alien planets, cop-infested spaceships, and a city chilling out inside the skull of a cosmic god, elevated beyond a popcorn-munching diversion by the Guardians themselves.”
Even after all the critical accolades, though, I never got around to playing it myself: too many games to play, too much residual ick from Marvel’s recent videogame and film slate (Midnight Suns aside). It does help that with Guardians of the Galaxy I can kinda squint and pretend it’s The Fifth Element or Valerian instead.
So I’m glad I can finally rectify this omission from my gaming diet—I no longer have to set aside $60 bucks for it, just 150 gigs of storage (ouch!) and a little over a dozen hours of my time. I’m a big fan of Eidos Montreal’s work on the Deus Ex reboot series, robot arms-based economy and all, so this is long overdue. You have until January 10 to claim Guardians of the Galaxy from the Epic Games Store.