Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

I’m not familiar with the Guardians of the comic books, but the plot and dialogues are pretty good, particularly in the way it’s all built around the interaction between characters. There’s a lot of dialogue and character-building to accompany you along both battle and exploration sequences. While the movies didn’t offer much variety location-wise, this game allows us to travel to different planets with vastly different atmospheres, sometimes giving us the option to explore the areas for extra loot. Combat got slightly more immediate and rewarding than in “Marvel’s Avengers” thanks to the addition of elemental attacks and more meaningful use of the non-playable characters’ actions in the team. However, things can get a little tiresome for players looking for action due to the abnormous amount of dialogues and cutscenes in between.

The Guardians films are my favorites of the MCU and it isn't really that close, so I was very happy to find that the story and presentation of this game, set in a different continuity, taps into the same humourous yet heartwarming energy of the Gunn films while giving us just enough tweaks to make it its own beast. This universe's Peter Quill has his major character dilemma flipped from looking up to potential father figures to the idea that he may be a father himself, a clever inversion of Volume 2's best quality that lends well to a story that checks a lot of expected boxes but is very solid in execution. The expected in-fighting within the Guardians manifests just differently enough and with wildly different solutions leading to fresh emotional outcomes for the series, and the quality of the script is high enough to elevate it above many games as well. As a Marvel fan, it's also good to see some characters that have been neglected within the canon, especially the one teased at the end of Volume 2. It feels a bit too close to the movies to be considered a truly great story, as its best ideas are too obvious in inspiration, but it more than carries the rest of the game, which has its ups and downs.

For a AAA game, it's refreshing to have gameplay this consistent and nailed down within a setting as creative, bright and beautiful, alongside characters as vibrant and likeable. Especially from Square Enix, who have been known to muddy the waters with extra baggage in their games. So I don't want to be too harsh on the gameplay, which is always at least a little fun because of intuitive and fluid controls and excellent feedback, with a fair balance between solo skill and team-based strategy, though certainly not to the same level as FF7R. But the combat never really rises above okay, it gets old about seven hours in, and there's still half the game to go, and in terms of mechanics, Guardians simply has nothing else to offer. The art design lends itself to some great setpieces, but those are fleeting moments in a sea of overly linear level design, half-baked RPG mechanics, basic as hell puzzles, and simply nothing else of note besides the great presentation and story. Even then, technical hiccups often distracted me from the experience. About the only noteworthy part of the game design are the "choose your karma" dialogue selections, which are surprisingly nuanced and long-lasting.

It's an easy recommendation for Guardians fans, effectively transplanting the appeal of those films on a substantial level while offering a fresh take on the setting, but for traditional game fans, it's just an above-average action game with some cool team mechanics, but all wasted on a setting better suited for a Mass Effect or Rise of the Argonauts, something with linear levels but non-linear world structure to put all the worldbuilding and RPG mechanics to use.

Can a game be great just based on its voice acting? I feel there's very few games that can actually match it in that department. A great cast of characters that are pretty faithful to how they appear in the movies, but also every NPC is just so memorable. The game just really feels like something special and it manages to build a grand story that goes way beyond what we've seen on screen (I wasn't a big fan of the movies to be fair).

There's thousands and thousands of lines of dialogue as the 5 main characters are always interacting with each other, even when you are walking by in areas they always spark up conversations and so many times it's bloody hilarious. The writing is really good and manages to capture their personality so well, it's just really fun to play and progress as you get to hear more and spend more time with these wacky bunch that are just full of tales and misadventures. The gameplay itself is pretty interesting early on, you control Star Lord and you can command the others to do special attacks or in exploration they each can do specific things to unlock the paths to go forward. However the game is very linear with no side content, the only thing is you get to unlock different outfits by finding the little secrets (which is really not much). Also the game falls a little short in the 2nd half as the gameplay is mostly just a repetition as you'll been doing the same similar things as you did before in the earlier chapters. But thankfully the game remains entertaining, so it's still something that you'll want to keep playing.

I'm not much familiar with Eidos Montreal but you should expect here something close to Shadow of the Tomb Raider than Deus Ex. The systems aren't very deep, there's only abilities and perks to unlock and those are very straight forward. It's possible that they dumbed it down for this project, but someone that played all their games can probably answer that better. The game is a cinematic action adventure that's very linear and you'll probably only want to play it once, but they managed to make it a great experience for that one time. In a way this is perhaps a good thing, since Open World Ubisoft-like is starting to grate people and not having all these side activities keeps you focus on the main story. The praise is warranted and I kinda can bypass its numerous flaws, since it did keep me glued to it (I completed it in 3 days, 17 hours in total) and as far as dialogue interaction it's pretty much unmatched. So yeah would recommend, it was a lot of fun.