Quick Look: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

More than anything the problem with this QL is that a majority of it is taking place during a walk-and-talk cinematic part of the game instead of the actual gameplay elements. Unless the entire game is evenly paced between short combat arena and then lengthy talky/scripted sections.

"Endlessly dunking on a game for no apparent reason whatsoever" has to be my least favorite QL format.

Its actually nice to see a more restrained and linear game once in a while, looks good.

FWIW, I'm a few hours into this game and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. A linear, single-player game is a breath of fresh air and the writing and voice acting are surprisingly good. I'm about to watch the QL and see what all the fuss is about. It's a shame if the crew is overly negative on it.

The combat is getting a bit better now that enemies have elemental weaknesses and I am getting more comfortable with the controls and squad commands. It's not mind-blowing, but it's good enough to pass the time until the next cutscene.

EDIT: And I suppose it's worth noting that I'm not a huge MCU fan. Not sure if that helps or hurts my reason for enjoying this game.

Audio is a bit crackly for me anyone else as well? Mostly on Jeff's mike.

There are three modes, not two. Quality, Performance, and Ray Tracing

Not sure I can stomach this game if it's so story heavy.

Weird that this comment section is apparently full of people who know right off the bat this is a primarily story driven game and people should skip it if they want action, and Rorie should have known that. Perhaps divert your clairvoyance to the lottery numbers or something, fam

Yeah, I'm probably at the midpoint of the game, end of Chapter 6, and I think the two most accurate reviews are from Gene Park of the Washington Post and Vice's Yussef Cole. The characters do get more likable as the game goes on, though Star Lord never stops sounding like a lost Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (the others are fine to great) and once you unlock some more of your teammates abilities and Star Lord's own elemental attacks the combat gets a bit less spongey than it feels in the first few fights...

But none of it ever becomes great, and a lot of stuff feels explicitly indebted to your knowing this property coming into it. This is going to be a damning sentence for some people probably, but I'm getting a lot of Mass Effect: Andromeda vibes off of this, in which everything is so just fine that I keep reaching for something to really love and so far it's not really there, but I also can't say I'm having a bad time either. It's just a lack of polish around everything, particularly as it pertains to dialogue pacing and the staging of all the prestige-game bits, that feels very PS3-era. It's not that they're bad, it's just that you can't have played a Sony first party game in the past five years and not seen how far all these things have come, and like the Tomb Raider series that's kind of all this game really wants to be but it feels like it came out with no prior knowledge of Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us other than a one-night fever dream.

That being said, this game is flat out gorgeous most of the time, and while the art design doesn't exactly feel coherent due to all the different alien worlds you visit it does at least scream we made some art over here!

As somebody who spent all of last generation on a base PS4, moslty playing on a TV that topped out at 720p anyway, there's enough novelty in all the HDR and 4K and 60fps swimming around the screen to keep my jaw dropping every few minutes even if it doesn't technically look as good as Red Dead Redemption II or Ghost of Tsushima do.

I'd say that if you're generally a soft for all the things this game wants to do, just know that much like the comics you don't ever spend a ton of time doing much of it, which means if you're doing something you don't like you won't be doing it for long, and that just because you don't like it initially doesn't mean it won't get a little endearing in its mediocrity a few hours later. It's a bit weird but this is kind of the modern equivalent of what licensed video games used to be at their very best - quirky, confused about exactly what they want to be other than an amalgam of every great video game ever made, sloppy in all the wrong parts and weirdly inventive in all the right ones - that makes this a pretty quintessential B-game by modern standards.

I'm cool with that, but if all the tropes this game is chasing after aren't your jam (and you hate the idea of hearing the word "flark" roughly two times per minute for seemingly the entire game) I'd steer clear because it really is mostly just a pastiche of better games that could make for a really cool sequel if it does well.

@swthompson: All of the marketing and trailers for the game showed MOSTLY primarily story, cutscenes, and branching narrative paths.. hardly any action gameplay. Almost in the realm of a Dark Pictures game. I don't think clairvoyance was needed to discern that.

Guess I'll skip this Quick Look based on the comments about it?

As someone who doesn't like Marvel movies, the idea of playing a game like this where all of the characters are quipping non-stop sounds like hell to me.

Matt being a bit of a negative Mancy here. It seems funny enough. The pacing is a bit slow, the writing isn't terrible though.

I hope future Jeff B Quick Looks have subtitles on, unless there are no subtitles at all, which would be way worse. It's impossible to understand anything that's going on with the story when everybody's talking over the cutscenes and the game's music is going at 100% at all times. Please try to remember to do that in the future, @jerf.

Edit: Okay, it got turned on about a quarter through the video.

Work like this is the reason I am no longer a subscribed member at GB.

Seems like a decent game overall. And I'm glad they didn't design the characters to look like the live action version from the MCU movies. When it comes to comic book games, I like the art to either be based on the actual comic or the animated series, not the live movies. I will check it out, when it goes on sale in a couple of months.

I don't know why, but the rapport between Jan, Rorie, and Jeff B. on this QL really clicked for me. It kind of reminded me of a Film and 40s episode.

If anyone is coming to this later on, I finished it and thought it was quite enjoyable. Nothing groundbreaking but if you are tired of giant open world RPG's, it is a refreshing shorter game. The combat gets more interesting as the game continues and the story was satisfying.

I'm usually as grumpy and jaded as they come, but this is a bit over the top even for me. This game looks nice (and, having just played the early sections being shown in this video, plays just fine too).