Guardians of the Galaxy, produced by Eidos Montreal, is a purely linear story-driven adventure. Moreover, it is not based on a specific comic book or films – this is one of the alternative universes where there are famous characters, but their fate is different. And you do not need to read the Marvel dictionary before that, all the information about the game world will be given to you anyway. Let’s put it this way: if you have watched the movies, then this will be enough. You don’t even have to be a fan – the Guardians of the Galaxy game is very self-sufficient as a separate story of a single world.
What else is interesting in the game – we will tell in our review.
Plot
You play as Peter Quill, the commander of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Despite their heroic status, the Hero Five are almost always broke and in search of money, which is why they always get into unpleasant situations and wanted lists. So this time, the Guardians, on a “verified” tip, go to the quarantine restricted sector in order to grab the legendary monster and then sell it.
Naturally, their idea fails, the Guardians are caught by the Nova Corps, a kind of local galactic policemen, and they are fined. In parallel, without knowing it, Peter releases a powerful creature, and while the Guardians go on another extravagant and dubious way to get money, evil is trying to swallow the entire galaxy.
And this is just a general start, because if I start to tell more, then I have to retell half the game.
The fact is that the plot in the game is in constant motion. The problems and decisions of the Guardians do not focus on one point and are so crazy that now, for example, they are flying to pay a fine to the local galactic police, and a few minutes later they are already robbing the owner of the zoo of rare monsters on a planet where lightning constantly strikes. And this is the coolest moment of the game – a funny, beautiful, epic and at times even dramatic adventure.
The characters never stop, they constantly communicate, the locations change and you want it to never end. Most of all, this is reminiscent of the Uncharted game series, only the main characters, instead of abandoned temples and shrines, fly from one fantastic planet to another. At the same time, you will solve problems both outside and inside the team. At the beginning of the game, the characters do not really trust each other, some spiritual scars are fresh. But in the process, the team members are revealed much deeper than in the movies. And from this they become a little closer to the player.
Characters
Game characters look like movie characters: Peter “Star-Lord” Quill is a kind and naive “adult teenager” stolen from Earth in his youth. Rocket the genetically engineered raccoon is a talented engineer and is always dragging anything that doesn’t lie well. Drax the Destroyer is a skilled warrior, but straightforward and always going ahead. Gamora is the most dangerous and unapproachable woman in the galaxy. Groot is the only representative of its tree genus. He is very strong, but kind, naive and speaks in one phrase: “I am Groot.”
But the fates of the heroes in this universe are different: for example, in this world, Thanos did not collect the rings and Drax killed him, Quill is not friends with Yondu at all, and there are no Avengers here at all. Some of this information can be read, but most of the characters themselves will tell you along the way.
The constant dialogue between the characters is both the highlight and the curse of the Guardians. Yes, you will learn a lot about your companions and the world in which they exist. Moreover, they have very lively and natural conversations: they joke, tease each other, doubt, admire and complain. Their characters and mood are revealed through this constantly incessant chatter, but this is what will sometimes become a minus.
The characters don’t shut up. Generally. They talk to each other all the time, and sometimes turn to you. And if at this moment you are busy with something or trying to concentrate on other information, then the chatter merges into a single white noise. It even gets to the point where conversations end abruptly because you hit a story trigger and a new dialogue starts. It seems to me that if you set out to listen directly to EVERYTHING that the heroes can say, then the game will take about 50 hours. One thing is good that most often it’s just chatter, but if you miss something very important, they will repeat it to you .
When I say that the characters speak to you, I mean a dialogue system that allows you to slightly influence what happens, but this is more a variant from the Telltale games than Mass Effect. That is, you will not have frequent and large dialogue branches, you are more of a listener, and most of your rare answers are more comfortable for you to play Quill. The general plot will not change from your decisions and will end exactly as intended, but sometimes those whom you helped will come to your aid.
Gameplay
As already mentioned, you play only as Peter Quill, you cannot control other members of the squad. In this case, your team acts as something like a set of abilities. While you are exploring the locations, they can break through the passage or break open the door in special places. During the battle, you can give them commands and they will perform special moves to fight enemies more effectively.
There is even a special Flyer where you have to choose one of the answers to motivate your friends. If the Fly is successful, then everyone gets a damage boost and a quick ability cooldown, and if not, then only Quill will receive an improvement. A nice bonus is always a cool track from Peter’s playlist.
All this sounds interesting, but in fact, combat is the most boring and routine part of the game. The problem is that your entire team does very little damage to enemies and is passive in combat. Only special techniques give significant damage, but only you can activate them, and after using them you have to wait, and they don’t shine with a special variety either. As for the visuals, everything is on top: there are cool finishing moves, animations and effects. But in practice, there are only a couple of tricks that cause worthwhile damage.
Due to low damage, your enemies turn into damage sponges. And okay, if you have some big robot in front of you. But the situation comes to the point of absurdity, when five of the tough heroes are torturing some ordinary soldier in a padded jacket. At such moments, all the epicness of what is happening disappears and it seems that you got into some kind of MMO, where your enemies are just strips of life above your heads.
Battles take place in arenas where a dozen of the same soldiers or creatures are poured on you, and until you kill them all, you will not move further. In the second half of the game, it starts to get very tired against the backdrop of cool and dynamic scenes and events. Moreover, the game has a very flexible difficulty setting, where, for example, you can increase the damage from Quill’s cannons, but even this is not enough. That is, the fights are not difficult, but rather protracted.
And another rather important problem of the game is bugs. There are, unfortunately, quite a lot of them, and they are all technical. Stuck controls, broken scripts, graphics glitches – in some locations I had to save and reload every 10 minutes because something broke or one of the menu items “stuck” in the middle of the screen. Perhaps these are PC flaws, but they are sometimes quite annoying. Fortunately, there were no moments that could not be solved by downloading. There is hope that all this will be corrected in future patches, but the impressions were not very pleasant.
Visual and sound
With all the bugs, the language does not dare to call the game of poor quality, because it looks and plays phenomenally. Eidos has reached some crazy picture level. Detailing, design, locations, textures, lighting – all together makes the jaw fall off when you arrive at the next colorful planet. The staging of cut scenes and animations, including facial ones, is up to the level of Sony exclusives. I want to look at everything, stop the game for the sake of juicy screenshots and replay it again for the sake of dynamic exciting scenes. “Guardians of the Galaxy” turned out to be a very beautiful and spectacular game.
Another element that works on the atmosphere is the music, or rather, the Star-Lord playlist. According to the plot, Peter Quill leaves the planet Earth with an old Walkman player, where various driving tracks of the 80s are recorded on the cassette. Mostly rock, but there are also more melodic pieces. This music plays all the time on Quill’s ship, but it is also included in the most epic scenes – and it perfectly complements the whole picture. You are even more charged with the energy of the moment, you want to shake your head to the beat and even sing along.
Verdict
Guardians of the Galaxy is a great space adventure that constantly takes you to new places and never gets bored. Funny, dramatic and epic dialogues of the characters perfectly reveal both themselves and the world in which they live. Despite routine fights, an incessant stream of chatter and unpleasant bugs, Guardians manages to keep the heat and interest even better than the movies. But the main thing is that Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is almost a reference representative of rich and exciting single-player adventure games, and I want to advise it to all players without exception.
The game was completed on PC in 22 hours.
