The free Epic Games Store title for this week has been revealed, and it’s a pretty major one, too. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is free to keep between now and January 11th.
Guardians of the Galaxy rounds off Epic’s free holiday offerings, which have also seen games like A Plague Tale: Innocence, Ghostrunner, and the ill-fated Saints Row reboot available for nothin’ at all.
This time, though, it’s the turn of action-adventure-shooter-thing Guardians of the Galaxy, which isn’t a Marvel Cinematic Universe tie-in, although its interpretation of the Guardians certainly hews fairly close to the movies’ version.
If you’re unfamiliar with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s a single-player third-person shooter in which you play as Star-Lord.
When a seemingly easy mission goes horribly awry, it’s up to you and the Guardians to avert potential galactic disaster in the only way you know how: blowing up a bunch of stuff and making a lot of quips.
As you battle enemies, you can issue orders to the various Guardians, setting up combos and entering into scrum-style team hustles wherein picking the right response leads to a heroic moment soundtracked by some of Star-Lord’s favorite tunes.
Although the game received strong reviews, not least from our very own Andrew Otton, it was still a relative disappointment for Square Enix in terms of sales.
In February 2022, a few months after Guardians of the Galaxy‘s release, the studio declared that the game hadn’t met its expectations financially, at least in the initial sales period.
However, the studio seemingly remained optimistic that sales would pick up in future. After all, Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t a live-service game, so it’s not going anywhere; people who haven’t discovered it can buy it whenever they like, at least for now.
For the meantime, Guardians of the Galaxy is available for free via the Epic Games Store, so be sure to pick it up if you haven’t already (and if you’ve got a machine beefy enough to handle it).
