Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy review: A farkin’ good time

Title: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
Developer: Eidos Montreal
Publishers: Square Enix
Platforms: PS5 (reviewed on), PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: October 26, 2021

I wouldn’t blame you if you approached Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy with apprehension after experiencing the letdown that was Marvel’s Avengers. But after spending dozens of hours zipping across the cosmic Marvel universe as the leader of this ragtag group of misfits, I’m here to tell you to throw any reservations out the window. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a farkin’ good time.

Like Marvel’s Avengers, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is published by Square Enix. But that’s about as far the similarities go with these two games.

Developed by Eidos Montreal, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a straight-up single-player action-adventure with RPG mechanics sprinkled in. There’s no tacked on microtransactions, no character levels or gear score and, despite it being a game that revolves around a group of characters, no convoluted online multiplayer.

Because all of this excess fat has been trimmed, Eidos Montreal is able to fully hone in on story and fundamental gameplay mechanics. The result is a fun-filled original story, intriguing and fleshed-out characters, and polished gameplay that successfully balances action and exploration.

The story of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, while original, feels like it has been pulled directly from the pages of a comic book (or the big screen). It’s a grand cosmic adventure filled with spectacle, action and, surprisingly, genuinely heartfelt moments between a colorful cast of characters.

For those unfamiliar with the source material, the Guardians of the Galaxy are a ragtag group of intergalactic misfits — Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Groot and Rocket — who, for various reasons, have found themselves banded together aboard the Milano. Eidos Montreal has taken some creative liberties with each of the character’s individual backstories which means getting to know them isn’t just a rehash of what you’ve read in the comics or seen in the movies.

Despite it being a group-oriented adventure, you play solely as Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord. While this may be considered a surprising choice, I actually the think the game is better for it as it allows you to experience the story and interact with each of the characters as the quote, leader, of the Guardians.

Although the story is entirely linear, there are some light roleplay elements sprinkled within the narrative. During the many different conversations you’ll have with fellow Guardians and the vast cast of characters you’ll come across, you’ll be given dialogue options to respond with. Most of the time, these responses are superficial and simply meant to help you feel as though you are actually in Star-Lords boots.

However, there are some moments where your choices will directly impact how the story unfolds. With Lady Hellbender, for example, your responses will determine what sort of mission experience you can have. For example, in my playthrough, my interaction with Lady Hellbender resulted in a massive firefight, whereas, that same section of the story presented a fellow coworker of mine with a stealth mission. The campaign is largely going to be the same for everyone, but these slight differences do help create a personal touch and provides a bit of replay value. Personally, I’d have liked to see more branching options, but this is mostly an action-adventure and less of an RPG.

The decisions you make as Star-Lord isn’t strictly limited to conversations, either. In combat, you’ll assign direction to your fellow Guardians. While they mostly hold their own in a fight, you can have them execute different abilities during battle. Their abilities do have short cooldowns, so managing this in combat is a nice strategic mechanic.

Combat reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy XV. Encounters are fast-paced and frenzied, but you are able to slow time and analyze the battlefield when you bring up the radial menu to assign actions to your teammates. Additionally, you can order teammates to interact with the environment, such as having Drax throw a large object at enemies, Rocket enabling landmines, and things of that nature.

As Star-Lord, you have a slew of gadgets at your disposal, but you’ll do most of your damage with your dual blasters which operate on a simple active-reload system. As you fire, the guns will overheat and you’ll have to actively stop the reload with a small green portion of a bar in order to get back in the action quickly and even get some bonus damage. Stopping it outside of the designated zone simply results in a longer cooldown before you can start firing.

In addition to his abilities, you’ll also unlock elemental abilities for Star-Lord’s blasters. These are used to exploit enemy weaknesses, remove their shields and even stagger them in combat and you’ll find yourself actively switching between the different elements quite a bit in combat, especially as it picks up towards the end of the game.

Additionally, throughout the game you’ll pick up resource materials that can be used to unlock different perks for Star-Lord. None of the upgrades felt particularly significant, although some do open up some additional moves in combat.

Each member of the Guardians has their own specific area of expertise. Rocket is an explosives expert and excels and dealing area of effect damage. Groot is excellent at crowd control, while Gamora can deal insane damage to individual enemies. Calling on each Guardian’s specific abilities at the right time will help you deal with the onslaught of enemies, although I never really found myself struggling on the game’s standard difficulty setting.

Each character has four special abilities, three of which can be unlocked with Ability Points that you earn through combat at any point during the game. The fourth ability for each character is unlocked during specific moments in the story.

I would’ve liked to see Eidos push the RPG envelope a little bit more with the individual character upgrades, perhaps even implementing a skill tree for each character. The only character leveling is unlocking the abilities. There are no weapon upgrades, no ability modifiers and no damage scaling. As a straight-forward action-adventure, it’s perfectly suitable, but it feels like they could’ve done more with it. I found that I was able to unlock every character’s abilities (except for the gated fourth one) around the halfway point of the game, which meant every encounter thereafter didn’t incentivize me with experience points.

It’s not the most in-depth or technical combat system but it works. It’s fun, fast-paced and just varied enough to remain enjoyable throughout the campaign.

When not in combat, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy offers light exploration and puzzle solving. The planets are mostly linear but occasionally you can head off the beaten track which usually results in some crafting resources or an outfit for one of the Guardians. Many of the environmental puzzles you’ll encounter will rely on you calling for help from the correct Guardian. Drax breaks through weakened areas, Groot can help you cross lengthy gaps, Rocket can crawl into small areas and Gamora can help you jump to higher areas. The puzzles are all pretty straight forward and the Guardians will usually help guide you if you get stuck. This is another example of an adequate gameplay system that doesn’t push the boundaries, but it helps break up the monotony of simply just walking.

For an action-adventure, I was actually surprised by how much narrative there is in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The dialogue almost feels like a Telltale game. Some of the best banter occurs while you’re simply walking around a planet and I actually found myself laughing out loud during some of the interactions, especially with Drax who very much reminds me of the big screen version in the MCU. The dialogue doesn’t stop when in combat either, although I found that to be somewhat more distracting as they often repeat the same lines. And them yelling over all the explosions and laser blasts was just pure chaos.

Unfortunately, when you’re relying on AI-controlled teammates, you sometimes run into some issues with their logic. On several occasions, with the PS5 version of the game, I was forced to reload a previous checkpoint and replay through a section because a character either wouldn’t react or respond as I needed them to in order to progress. For some bosses, it wouldn’t let me direct a character to interact with certain environmental features.

These weren’t exactly game-breaking bugs but they did happen more frequently than I would’ve liked. And because these bugs happened quite frequently, there is one moment in the game in particular that involved a repeating cave system sequence that I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or a glitch. I found myself restarting from the checkpoint just because I wasn’t sure. I still don’t know how I solved it, or if there was anything to even solve to begin with, but I did end up pushing through it.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (PS5) Score: 8

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a fun-filled cosmic adventure. No aggressive microtransactions, no tacked on multiplayer, just a good ol’ fashioned single-player adventure with MCU-worthy blockbuster sequences and heartfelt story moments. The combat offers just enough variance and depth to remain entertaining throughout your playthrough but the magic truly resides within the colorful cast of characters.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.