Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy review

Good scut

In the opening scene, you’re listening to Star-Lord, a fictional hard rock (more like speed metal) band, whose album you’ve presumably just bought. Peter Quill is now a fan of hard rock and metal. That was right up my alley. I spent about 20 minutes listening to the songs of the band, looking around, and thinking how great the game was going to be since they've created a band just for Peter's backstory! And it was.

Characters are the main focus here, the events mainly serving the function of consolidating the bonds between the crew members. Almost everything the Guardians do is for a fellow Guardian or someone they care about. This makes the external threats feel less serious than they ought to be, but that is not a big problem, it's not that kind of game. As the story progresses, the player gets to witness the Guardians become a stronger team by learning to accept each other, with their weaknesses and quirks. Understanding and acceptance make up the underlying theme of the game.

The banter between the Guardians is probably the best in recent years, reminiscent of Bioware's good days. It is supported by decent voice acting, although it would have been nice to hear some more original interpretations. As expected, a lot of the banter is funny, though at times you feel like rolling your eyes rather than chuckling. Very frustrating, however, is that, on many occasions, the dialogues are overlapping or are cut off abruptly by a cutscene or another dialogue. It is not something we haven't seen in many other games, too bad it's still an issue.

Visually, the game is stunning. The environments are simply gorgeous. The heavy use of vibrant colors is evident even from the poster. There's nothing dark or gritty here, and it dovetails the nature of the story and the gang.

The combat is fun, but I found myself wishing there was less of it. Some fights drag on forever without any reason. It feels good to use your abilities and those of your teammates to clear a path or to reach something shiny and, likewise, this is what shines in battle. The melee combat feels pretty satisfying, too. The abilities look pretty good and there are also some nice finishing moves. There are two or three space battles, too, but they’re not metal, to put it mildly.

You can encounter quite a few annoying bugs and, apparently, they aren't doing anything to fix them. I had to reload a few times, because the game had gotten stuck. The most annoying bug happened at some point when you could talk to Drax on your ship (to get some backstory from him), but the game became unresponsive after you did. Reloading only made it unresponsive before talking. Also, on PC, the wireless Xbox controllers are not detected and playing with mouse and keyboard is not that good. Works just fine if you plug the controller, though.

Space opera, especially the Marvel kind, is the perfect subgenre for teambuilding and beautiful friendships. That's what the game offers and that's what it does best. The story, the dialogue, the gameplay, pretty much everything, is built around the constantly growing beautiful friendships. And it's good, no doubt about it.