Guardians of the Galaxy

Introduction

Guardians of the Galaxy is a single-player action-adventure title, with you taking the role of Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord as you embark on an adventure on a galactic scale!

The game runs decently on my Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 3060, 16GB RAM, 1080p@75fps in Exclusive Windowed Mode and on High settings with Ray-tracing, with only a few visual hiccups during cutscenes.

Story

Due to the way the story has been structured, it's difficult to explain without spoiling major points about the overall narrative. Without going too deep into it:

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Peter Quill and the gang find themselves at the edge of space near the entrance of a forbidden Quarantine Zone, with a mission goal to secure a rare monster so sell off so they can make enough money to make ends meet and go their separate ways, except things don't quite go the way as planned. Right as they are about leave, they are slammed with a huge fine for entering forbidden space! They must now band together and learn to trust each other, as they gather the funds to clear their names.

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One point against the story is that it expects you to have seen the first Guardians of the Galaxy film. In a vacuum, it becomes more difficult to understand the characters and what makes them tick, since this title doesn’t make as much effort to bring its audience up to speed.

Nonetheless, the writing in and of itself more than makes up for this blunder, as it is absolutely chock-full of hilarious dialogue exchanges. Beyond the excellent comedy tone, several sequences throughout the story managed to tug on my heartstrings.

Gameplay

Combat entails the use of your trusty handguns to pepper foes with, and has you command your fellow companions to engage with various abilities. As you progress through the story, you can unlock additional moves to increase your offensive capabilities. The execution on combat alone is done exceptionally well, keeping the flow of gameplay up when engaging in and out of encounters.

During the heat of battle, you can execute a “Huddle” when it becomes available, suddenly bringing the team together for a quick-time speech event. If your allies are getting trashed by the enemy, this can tip the scales in your favour. However, if you don’t deliver the correct response, only Peter Quill gets an attack bonus, instead of the whole team.

Enemies come in many different flavours, with each bearing unique designs based on the location. Some require different strategies or using quick-time button events to dish out extra damage. The environment can also be used in your favour as your teammates can be commanded to activate or use certain obstacles: you can order Drax to hurl a nearby barrel at his nearest enemy, or have Groot turn the ground into a spike trap and launch your enemies helplessly into the air.

You gain experience by engaging in combat, putting good use to both Peter Quill and his friends’ abilities. All throughout, your performance is measured as a combo title, all the way up to “Marvellous”. Levelling up provides you with ability points, to further bolster your buddies’ skills. Additionally, if a crafting bench is nearby, Rocket can create further enhancements for Peter through the use of materials, which can be found sprinkled randomly in various quantities in each level.

Checkpoints are quite abundant, and there are no limited lives to worry about. As you progress through the campaign, the waves of enemy forces get significantly stronger, leaving an experience that actually overwhelmed me at first and tempted me to lower the difficulty, despite the penalties of dying being quite low.

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Occasionally confusing level design makes getting lost a possibility and no less frustrating to deal with. A walkthrough may be necessary for a couple of occasions, as I’m sometimes left scratching my head on how to proceed. Thankfully, these moments were kept to a minimum.

Peter Quill has a terrain scanner in his possession that he can use to scan for any nearby hints or secrets which may be of use to the Team. It is highly encouraged to use it often, not only to have a clear path on how to progress, but also to look for hidden goodies.

Presentation

And in terms of visuals, this title is nothing short of excellent! Even on lower-end settings, the game still pulls off an impressive visual spectacle to behold.

For the sound front, there is a fully orchestrated soundtrack present alongside licensed music from the 80’s, which plays throughout gameplay. Makes me want to bop my head to it, every time. The game’s original soundtrack consists mainly of a modern heavy rock track while the licensed music focuses more on pop and timely classics, akin to the Awesome Mixtapes from the films; however, an option to disable the additional licensed tunes is available if that is desired.

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This game is fully voice acted in multiple languages, and there is a dialogue exchange for almost every interaction you make. Many of the responses shared hilarious dialogue and gave me a good chuckle, keeping me engaged throughout the whole campaign.

Occasional dialogue options will appear for you to choose what Peter says to the team during their travels, which gives a nice dynamic feel to conversation, and more freedom to speak your opinion. With the correct dialog choices, some of which are timed, you can successfully convince several other characters to provide assistance later through the story.

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Included in the menu, a photo mode can do all kinds of useful things, such as making the character face the camera, adjusting field of view and position, orbit around or focus in on a particular character, apply filters, or even change poses and facial expressions. It is also possible to enter photo mode during cutscenes, however your options are more limited compared to regular gameplay. This is a really high quality photo mode, in all honesty!

One can change the difficulty settings at any point throughout the game, down to individual aspects relating to combat. While this has been done before, it’s nonetheless commendable as it allows players to tailor the experience to their own skill and preference.

There is an accessibility option that can auto-win some quick-time events, eliminating the need for timed button inputs during perilous situations. This has no effect on dialogue choices.

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Further replayability comes in the form of many collectables lay strewn about within the expansive maps you can explore, either as cosmetics, or items that can offer more dialogue exchange between your friends - sometimes containing more lore that not even the films had touched upon yet.

New Game+ exists once the game has been beaten, overwriting your existing save file and carries all of your abilities, cosmetics and collectables over to the new file. Enemies don’t appear any stronger from my experience, though.

All in all, the campaign took around 23 hours to beat at a casual pace. It would have been nice to see a multiplayer option or some other mode to keep more replay value, other than New Game+, but regardless, this was a fun ride to be on and one I'm glad I didn't miss!