Today we are going to take a look at Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series - Episode 1. This newest episodic adventure game from Telltale Games allows you to experience one of the glorious adventures of the popular superhero team Guardians of the Galaxy and fight for galactic peace. It is available on Steam for 22 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

Video review

Text review

Gameplay

Let me start by saying this. If you are going to watch this review, at least some spoilers are unavoidable. I’ve tried to limit the amount of possible spoilers by cutting out the audio from the game-play, but even then, at least parts of the story will definitely be spoiled if you watch the video. If you want just to know whether the game and mainly the story is worth the purchase, I strongly urge you to minimize the window in which the review is running.
With that being said, it’s time to start with the review itself and we’ll start with the game-play. If you have ever played any of the Telltale adventure games, the basic game-play mechanics will come as no surprise to you. It isn’t a first person shooter nor is it a point-and-click adventure game, it follow the cinematic route towards storytelling laced with quick-time events that require you to perform some sort of action in a certain amount of time to do it correctly.
In addition to that, when it comes to making decision in conversations, you again only have a certain amount of time to make a decision which of the several conversation routes you want to go with. And based on which way you go, some of the future events will transpire a bit differently.
Usually the impact it will have on the overall story-arc won’t be really that huge, but there are certain decisions that will have a heavy story impact.

But otherwise, there really isn’t much to say about the game-play of nearly all Telltale games. It’s just up to you whether this cinematic approach with a bít of button mashing put in at places is something you enjoy, are willing to go through or whether it is something you can’t really stand.
For me, personally, it’s the middle route, I’m willing to ignore for the most part to experience the story if the story is interesting for me and! good enough.

Story

So onto the story, but how to do it without spoiling the story itself? Well, let’s just talk about whether I thought the story was good, whether the writing was fun and enjoyable and whether it did leave any emotional impact on me.
And let’s start from the end – whether it did leave any emotional impact on me. And yeah, to a certain degree it did. I’m not gonna say I was crying my eyes out or that I was laughing my ass of. But I did feel sad at times and I did laugh and chuckle at different times.
And that is because of the writing – I gotta say, I really enjoyed it as I felt it did convey the characters of the unlikely hero band very well. Though, your choices do also vary in quality of the writing, specially based on whether you choose to role-play the characters best to how you know they would behave based on their established personalities or whether you make choices based on your own personality.
But overall, I thought the character were well written and most of all, were really fun. Yes, whether you will enjoy the writing is heavily based on whether you personally like the general theme of Guardians of the Galaxy, but I think that is something well understood by most people anyway.

Graphics

The thing I was probably least satisfied were the graphics. Not saying they are bad – far from it. What didn’t like, were the character models. Yes I know that they look very different in the comics then they do in the movie. And yes they are more akin to the ones in the comic (which will probably make most comic readers happy), but I felt like they were a bit lacking in their own personality. Peter Quill and Gamora felt a bit life-less and we certainly haven’t gotten our share of our beloved Groot in this game. On the other hand, Drax and Rocket were animated pretty well.
But in general, the graphics were fine, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from such an established developer and with this big of a brand.

Sound and music

If there is one thing Guardians of the Galaxy have been known for, it’s Peter Quill taste in music. And I’m more then happy to report, that the Telltale game follows this up very well.
The tunes you will hear in the game are of the same sort you can hear in the movies and animated tv-series and give out that optimistic cheerful atmosphere we’ve come to expect from this franchise.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is another adventure game by Telltale. Their formula has been out there for a while now and you can easily find examples of how the game-play works online. So the real question is, is the story worth it. And I’ve come to a conclusion that if you are a fan of the Guardians of the Galaxy or just a bit more comedic story lines, it is. If that is not your jam, there are other better suited adventure games – even from Telltale out there. But the good writing in this one does certainly make it a good choice for fans of this particular genre.
And I also want to mention that the timing on this release is done really well, because the Guardians of the Galaxy volume 2 is soon to be released in cinemas.

Well, that’s it for today guys. Hope you liked the video and if you did, please consider liking it, subscribing to my channel and comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later, with more gaming content.

disclaimer: Images have been used directly from the Steam store page