Guardians Of The Galaxy is a third person, story driven shooter following Marvel’s space travelling heroes.

Progression works with chapters that have clear start points that allows for easy save/stop points. This structure allows players to easily revisit parts of the game to find collectibles like costumes or character related objects.

The story follows the team as they attempt to pay a fine for carrying contraband. This leads them to a point where a religious space cult is trying to take over and the Guardians have to stop them. It gets a bit weird at points but is engaging enough as an excuse for an adventure. Plus there’s a group of bounty hunters chasing you the whole game.

The player being Star Lord gets some choices in dialogue, even choices in the game but all these change is dialogue. There’s no big difference with the plot from what I can tell as all the levels are set so the choices are largely false or pointless.

Combat feels fairly standard with Star Lord using twin pistols to blast enemies. The other Guardians can be ordered to use special attacks which have a massive effect on enemies. Star Lord also gets elemental shots on his guns that can damage enemies that have specific resistances. The stand out feature is the team Huddle that you can do sometimes, this involves getting a speech puzzle right which causes all sorts of buffs to hit the team as an eighties hit blasts out. It’s just an assault on the senses that works really well with the bright, flashy battles.

Apart from the team Huddle, all the things that effect combat also effect travel and puzzle solving making for a varied experience. The movement animation of the characters look really good, that includes enemies.

It’s not all talking, combat and moving. We get fun little bits like space jet dogfighting, sing at the lama and other short but different things. It’s all just pointless fun which I’m happy about.

There are new attacks that can be unlocked with level up upgrades for all of the characters. Plus there are craftable character upgrades for Star Lord using resources found in levels.

The Guardians are unconventional as heroes, being a collection of monsters, pirates and criminals. They have their own brand of charm which the developers have capitalised on by having great voice acting and dialogue.

I occasionally had an issue where I’d get stuck on some scenery, after about a minute this would fix itself by teleporting me a few steps back. It’s not great that this is a thing but it’s nice that they thought to fix it.

Having unlockables without micro transactions is brilliantly refreshing and I’d like to see more games have this attitude of having everything in game be as good as possible and available to players.

Overall, it’s a good game. It feels old but looks new. Rather than an open world overblown game we get an older style done well and it feels all the better for it. A really good single player experience elevated to greatness by a general sense of fun backed by an awesome eighties sound track. If you’ve even had a tiny itch to play this then I’d definitely recommend it.