Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

The voice acting and chitter-chatter between the characters are so natural and unconventional that it absolutely nails the feeling of playing a movie. Chef’s kisses to the script and dialogue writers. Guardians of the Galaxy is a benchmark for comic book videogames that want to drive story-driven games simply on the merit of meaningful dialogues. Not that the chatter between any of the Guardians is meaningful to its fictional characters. It’s more often than not banter, but banter that is well presented and executed. The always-angry Rocket and his quips on Quill’s inability to do anything productive, mixed with Drax’s sincere and humourless tone feel like the game has ripped the pages out from the comic books and sprinkled life into sterile speech bubbles.

As Peter Quill, you get the dialogue options to settle down a group dispute or pitch in your thoughts during a random conversation. Although some dialogue options can immediately change a certain level in the game, others can show the merit of your choice in the later stages of the game. It’s truly replayable and even if you know the outcome and the surprises from a single run, some dialogue options can offer entirely new cutscenes and combat options. These conversations are at the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy’s gaming experience, but it’s still a videogame about saving the world. And to that extent, the game even manages to surprise us with its combat, world-building, and jaw-dropping visuals.

If you’ve played the Final Fantasy 7 Remake from last year, the combat will feel very similar. If you haven’t, this is a good way to get introduced to single-player combat with multiple characters drawing the same level of screen time and story value. You control Peter Quill aka Star-Lord, who can shoot enemies with his blaster and even command other guardians to swoop in and execute cool moves.

Apart from shooting and dodging, the core of the gameplay is to mix and match the other Guardian’s abilities to mow through the smaller enemies. Some enemies take elemental damage which fills their stagger meter after which you can execute finisher moves. It’s all very similar to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and we loved the combat then, and we love it now. It’s not toe-tapping or nerve-wracking in any way, but you can fine-tune the difficulty in the settings to make your galaxy saving adventure a bit meatier.

The Milano (the ship) is now your home and with that comes a tiny episode of Big Boss where each Guardian is doing their own thing on the ship in between missions. Aside from the aforementioned bickering between the Guardians, there are conversations that can be unlocked by finding hidden items on mission planets. These conversations are here to essentially give Star-Lord’s character the much-needed depth in maintaining team integrity and morale.

These conversations also explore the extent of the Marvel universe, and how each of these five characters came together. The game respects the lore in the Marvel Universe and that’s why you’ll never get bored of these conversations or even shy away from talking to every character before moving on to the next mission area.

The animation and cutscenes are also done superbly. Facial expressions from Rocket are really hard to tell from the CGI in the recent movies. The characters are also detailed along with the world. Obviously, if your system can handle the Ray Tracing chops, this is one of the finest games that display Ray Tracing at its absolute best! You will need a beefy system to run all the Ray Tracing grunt.

Our reference GPU, the Zotac Nvidia RTX 3080 could handle the game at 2K resolution with graphics turned all the way up. It pushes a solid 110+ frames and scenes that have explosions and fire lather the environment and Star-Lord in hues that wouldn’t have been possible without Global Illumination and Ray Traced reflections.

Obviously, you can get all of these fine next-gen graphics on the PS5 as well. The PlayStation manages to rival the beefiest GPUs with its careful optimization and dynamic resolution. It’s really hard to tell the difference between the two platforms while playing the game, and that’s why the game absolutely belts optimization and performance whether you’re on PC or a console.

Sadly, it doesn’t support PlayStation’s Tempest Audio which is fine because it’s not the open world and doesn’t need audio cues to point you in the right direction. It’s very linear. That being said, there’s a proper album soundtrack dedicated to the lore in the game. Star-Lord Band which inspired Quill’s superhero name has a proper album made just for the game and it’s a banger. Get a good audio system in place before you play this game.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is one of the few games that doesn’t need to be placed on top of a podium and be bathed in accolades. It doesn’t bring anything groundbreaking from a critical perspective, but for a gamer and a Marvel fan, this game is a promissory note for the future of single-player games with a bottomless budget.

The audio, soundtrack, graphics, script, dialogues and heck, even the dialogue choices piece everything we love about this game into a wholesome package. This is easily one of our most favourite games of this year. If you’re a Marvel fan, get it now!