With its first comic dating all the way back to 1939, it's fair to say that Marvel's been in the game for quite some time. Over the last 80 years, Marvel has become one of the most influential companies of all time, with its products stretching across all spectrums of the pop-culture world. From movies to comics to TV shows, Marvel has a strong presence in just about every entertainment industry, and the video game market is no different. While Marvel games have been around since the dawn of the industry, one of the company's most recent releases, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, may just be its most unique title to date.
Released last year to a healthy amount of critical acclaim, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy managed to nab the Game Award for Best Narrative and impressed both casual and die-hard Marvel fans with an exciting, surprisingly emotional space-faring adventure. Though there have been countless Marvel games in the past, some of which are still beloved today, Guardians of the Galaxy is a particularly special title, with a handful of elements that make it undeniably unique.
Guardians of the Galaxy Puts Complex Characters at its Core
The core element of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, and the biggest feature that makes it stand out from the rest of Marvel's gaming catalog, is its main cast of complex characters. Before 2014, the Guardians of the Galaxy were one of Marvel's lesser known teams. While long-time Marvel fans knew the dysfunctional space family, casual fans had likely never heard of the group before, and upon finding out that a movie was in the works, many were a little skeptical, which is pretty easy to understand when a third of the team consists of a walking tree and a talking raccoon.
But 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy ended up being one of the best MCU movies of all-time, and one of the most commercially successful. It wasn't long before characters like Groot and Rocket were household names, and the Guardians of the Galaxy quickly became one of the most beloved comic book teams of the modern generation. So, Eidos Montreal's Guardians of the Galaxy had quite the legacy to live up to, and somehow, it managed to not only reach the heights of its movie counterpart, but surpass it in some ways.
Beginning just a few months into the group's formation, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy gives fans a look at the group being even more dysfunctional than usual. The game starts out with the team in constant squabbles with one another, with Peter Quill being the glue that's barely holding everyone together. But over the course of the game, players get to see the team come together one-by-one, until eventually, they're a family, and that journey is one of the most emotionally investing narratives in any Marvel video game.
Over the course of Guardians of the Galaxy's 20-hour runtime, players have the opportunity to engage in a plethora of conversations with their teammates, each one adding more depth to the character. By the end of the game, players should have an extensive knowledge of each characters' backstory, motivations, and personality, and all of that culminates in each member feeling three-dimensional, which in turn forms a strong connection between the player and the rest of the Guardians. For some fans, this version of the Guardians of the Galaxy is the definitive one, being comic accurate while also providing some of the most complex inter-character relationships the Marvel team has ever seen across all forms of media. This emphasis on creating relatable and complex characters is perhaps the biggest way in which Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy manages to stand out.
Guardians of the Galaxy Has a Unique Blend of Gameplay
In the past, Marvel games have often stuck to just one primary type of gameplay. The vast majority of Marvel's back-catalog of games tend to predominantly be third-person action games, often closely following the third-person shooter genre, for titles like Iron Man, or the beat-em-up genre, for titles like X2: Wolverine's Revenge, Fantastic Four, and Captain America: Super Soldier. While some Marvel games do have minigames or other additional modes that offer a different type of gameplay, for the main portion of the title, the player will just be experiencing one gameplay genre.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, on the other hand, blends a range of gameplay genres together, another big factor in classifying it as one of the most unique Marvel games to date. Though Guardians of the Galaxy remains a third-person action game throughout its entirety, the gameplay itself varies quite a bit during that time. The combat encounters in Guardians of the Galaxy are third-person shooter segments, where the player controls Star-Lord as they blast foes away with their elemental pistols. At the same time, the player can issue a range of squad commands to their teammates, each one aiding in combat in one way or another. As players progress through the game, more squad abilities are unlocked, and these encounters become more complex and engaging as a result.
But on top of this complex third-person action gameplay, Guardians of the Galaxy also breaks up the action with a handful of environmental puzzles. While they're pretty simple, and they can slow the pace of the game down quite a bit, these puzzle sections do add some variety to the gameplay and are often packed full of funny and engaging dialogue.
Ship combat sections are also packed into Guardians of the Galaxy, adding some shoot-em-up gameplay to the mix. And on top of everything else, Guardians of the Galaxy also has some narrative and dialogue choices that impact the outcome of story and gameplay segments, throwing in some RPG elements for good measure. Unlike the rest of Marvel's back-catalog, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy isn't afraid to constantly mix things up, and is arguably the most unique Marvel game to date as a result.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
