Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Review

If you’re like me and grew up playing video games throughout the early 2010’s, you’ll probably remember when games had no microtransactions, no DLC, and often even no side missions or other bonus content. Just a single, straightforward adventure from start to finish. While extra stuff is still usually fun and some games do get DLC right, I’ll always welcome any game that brings back that old formula. Eidos-Montréal has done just this with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a fun, action-packed story with elements of choose-your-own-adventure and not a single microtransaction in sight. You play as Peter Quill, a.k.a Star Lord, the captain of a motley crew that includes Gamora, Drax, Rocket & Groot. If you’ve watched any Marvel movies lately, this will all sound familiar, but trust me - this particular version of the team is very different to their film counterparts. Even if you’re a stranger to the Marvel universe, this game is definitely an excellent introduction, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

For my first playthrough, I played on the default difficulty setting, expecting to have to lower it over time since I often have trouble with combat on console games. However, the game turned out to be very well-balanced, giving me a challenging experience but not an annoying or frustrating one. Some fights were a little more tricky than others, but I never once felt angry or bored at any point throughout the entire game. The combat is engaging and requires a fair bit of awareness and planning, directing your companions around the battlefield and juggling ability cooldowns. Between fights, the game is full of puzzles that are fun and interesting all through the game, forcing the player to be very aware of their surroundings and the tools available to them. The game also does its best to break up repetition, with certain segments of combat where one or two of the Guardians are absent, making the player change up their strategy and generally ensuring that the game stays challenging without being monotonous. Finally, the most fun part of the game was just the sheer absurdity and over-the-top awesomeness of it all - Eidos-Montréal definitely knows how silly the Guardians can and should be, and embraces it fully. At one point, there’s a quick-time event where Peter Quill catches his beloved mixtape in mid-air, in space, while fiery explosions rock the screen and a gigantic freaking dragon flies past! Even Gamora comments on how metal the whole sequence was. This game takes itself only as seriously as the Guardians take their job - that is, not very - and it’s brilliant.

One thing that genuinely impressed me, even before I started playing the actual game, was how customisable the difficulty was. Some games allow a fair bit of player control over the difficulty, but it’s usually hidden in some out-of-the-way options menu or even require the use of developer consoles. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, however, simply has it all sitting on the difficulty selection screen, basically the very first thing you see when you start playing. The amount of depth the options had was even more impressive - how much damage you deal, how much damage you take, health regeneration, ability cooldowns, QTE difficulty, just about every aspect of gameplay can be fiddled with at any moment. In my second playthrough, I remembered certain especially difficult combat sections, and temporarily lowered the damage I took just a little bit for those fights, making them easier without trivialising them. I highly encourage more developers to allow this level of player control. Once you get started in the game proper, the combat controls are easy to learn and well-tutorialised, quickly becoming reflex like over the course of the game. Outside of combat, the various puzzles are often decently tricky to figure out without being annoying or tedious, giving the player a constant and consistent level of fun and challenging gameplay for the entire campaign.

This game has excellent environment design, featuring some of the most bizarre and suitably otherworldly settings I’ve ever seen. From a massive space junkyard held together by weird pink goo to the bustling, neon-lit plazas of Knowhere, each area is genuinely stunning to take in and it all looks amazing. The rainy and snowy areas have extremely well-animated weather effects, right down to puddles of rain pooling on the ground and the wind blowing through the air. The character models are also very well done, with each of the main characters looking distinct from their more recognized movie counterparts while still feeling familiar. The more cinematic story cutscenes are incredibly well-animated, with each character’s facial expressions feeling realistic, making me empathise with them just from expression alone. However, in most of the optional, dialogue-based cutscenes, the character animations are rather stiff and twitchy. The lip-syncing could definitely be improved in those cutscenes, and it’s a little unnerving when none of the characters blink in them either.

As to be expected in a Guardians of the Galaxy game, the soundtrack is simply brilliant. There’s an impressive collection of 80’s songs that play throughout the game, and the original orchestral soundtrack brings an epic, cinematic feel to the more serious and dramatic moments of the story. The ambient environment sound effects are very immersive, such as the rain and thunder in one of the earlier levels and the various explosions and laser blasts throughout the entire game. The voice acting is also excellent, particularly in some of the more emotional scenes; Gamora’s voice actress, Kimberly-Sue Murray, does a brilliant job of making Gamora probably the most well-acted and sympathetic character in the game. Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of dialogue in the game, it’s all too easy to accidentally skip conversations outside of combat, and there’s no option to have the characters resume talking about whatever they were discussing before they were interrupted. During combat, dialogue tends to repeat itself far too often, making some of the more extended fighting areas rather annoying.

While there isn’t any specific incentive to do New Game +, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy has plenty of hidden skins and collectables scattered throughout the chapters, all of which can be missed if you haven’t been on the lookout while playing. If you accidentally skip a hidden item, you’ll either have to reload a previous checkpoint or just try again on the next playthrough. In addition, considering the highly customisable difficulty and the various dialogue options throughout the story, there’s a lot that the player could try across multiple playthroughs; checking out different story paths, attempting self-imposed challenge runs, and so on. It’s probably a wise choice to have a walkthrough open for future playthroughs, however - most of the collectables and secrets are extremely (and sometimes frustratingly) well-hidden, and many important events can only be triggered by very specific dialogue options.

In total, the entire story campaign took roughly 17 hours for me to finish. Considering there’s no side missions or other bonus content to pad out the playtime, a 17-hour story campaign is definitely worth the price at the very least. There was never a single moment, even in my second playthrough, that I felt bored or the game felt predictable. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a consistently entertaining and engaging adventure for the entire ride, as well as a welcome throwback to the early, simpler days of adventure games that you could just sit down and enjoy for hours on end without being hassled by meta-shops or some of the other more annoying parts of the modern gaming world. While I do have some tiny little nitpicks, like the occasional janky bit of animation and the easily-interruptible dialogue, I genuinely cannot recommend this game enough. 9/10.