I'll keep this review spoiler-free, but I played this when it first came out and again just recently. I enjoyed it even more on the second play-through. As far as a shooter goes, it's a pretty standard affair, but what raises this game up is it's story. Get to the end, and you will be rewarded. It's only about 6-8 hours long, and to keep all of the moments fresh, I suggest playing it in one sitting. I'm only giving it 4/5 stars though because the game-play is somewhat dated feeling and if it weren't for the story, this game would simply be mediocre and not worth revisiting.
So many games try and fail to capture the magic of old school run-and-guns, but this one definitely pulls it off. The gameplay is fantastic with an appropriate amount of movement options, super-responsive controls, great music and sound effects, and excellent quips by your character as they mow down bad guys. Each boss fight is roughly the same difficulty, but each boss is unique and requires learning their patterns, making these fights one of the best parts of the game. Also, the soundtrack is excellent and it's one of the few video game soundtracks that I would consider listening to outside of the game, so if that's your thing, I would recommend getting the copy that includes it.
This is a bunch of mini-games in the style of early 90's games and as a collection, it just didn't click with me. The mini-games are bound together with an overarching story that's revealed to you through short "memopad" entries. I played this developer's earlier game, TIS-100, and enjoyed it thoroughly. But this one has failed to grab my attention. The mini-games are good, but not great, and that's what hurts this more than anything. For example, there's a kitchen simulator, which is kind of fun, but it's got a steep learning curve and no real story inside of the mini-game itself. If you want a fully-fleshed out version, you should be playing Automachef instead. The same is true for most of the mini-games; there are full games on GOG that do a better job. In any case, I don't regret having bought it and I look forward to this developer's next game, but this one wasn't for me.
My wife and I played this by sharing turns at the keyboard. Like most Telltale games, it's really more of a movie than a game, but it's a fun experience. We only know the Guardians from the first movie and while this was based off of the comic books, the characters were all instantly familiar. The voice acting was great, with the sole exception of Gamora, who was merely good. The plot moves at a nice pace. There's not too much opportunity for exploring; you're guided from conversation to conversation pretty quickly, so that makes this a pretty decent game to watch someone else play. The performance was decent, hitting a solid framerate most of the time at 1920x1080 with all settings dialed up to the max on a GTX 970, but I did see a few moments of occasional stuttering. What I noticed about the stuttering was that it didn't seem to be related to the amount of graphics on screen, so it may have been due to something else like background loading. The game menus mention something about CrowdPlay, some way for multiple people to control one game. I'm not sure what that's about and I couldn't find any more details (except some links online that mentioned it was used at SXSW this year). I would have loved if you could hand controllers to everyone in the room and everyone plays the game cooperatively - I'm hoping that's what this is, but more likely it's some sort of Twitch integration.
