PlayStation 4 Critic Reviews

I’ve been critical of some of Telltale Games’ endings in the past, but I really enjoyed how Guardians of the Galaxy wrapped up. Did I regret some of the choices I made? Definitely. But more importantly, I felt as if the team had legitimately grown due to some poor judgment calls, even if poor Groot was missing an arm by the end.

While many aspects of the story are on a linear path, the consequences of some defining choices do echo into the season’s end, including a few important characters being alive or dead. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Guardians of the Galaxy offers a particularly compelling spread of choices across its many episodes. Instead, the biggest selling point of the season is the opportunity to glimpse some backstory for these popular superheroes, and explore the interpersonal dynamics that those histories have on the team. If that sounds appealing, there’s good reason to give Guardians a shot. The action may be lackluster, and the path through the story may not be filled with surprises, but I did manage to care how it all shook out for this mismatched squad of heroes, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of video game characters.

I’m definitely curious to see what that future holds for the Guardians, and where Telltale might take them next.

Episode Five brings the season to a positive close, and while we all like a happy ending, it does perhaps paper over a few of the more negative choices you’ve likely made. The character-driven aspects of the series have been brilliant, as has learning more about each of the Guardians’ pasts, but it’s still been foisted by Telltale’s creaky engine and often dull interactivity.

The finale's heightened pace plays to the series' strengths, removing much of what made previous episodes so frequently frustrating, and so perhaps if there is a second season of Telltale's Guardians -- and, like any Marvel movie, you should probably stick around until after the credits for hints as to what might happen next -- we can only hope that it follows the blueprint of Don't Stop Believin'. It's not perfect, but if you're a fan of Telltale's formula or the eponymous Marvel characters, the improved latter half of the series makes Guardians of the Galaxy just about worth playing.

Don’t Stop Believin’ helps to undo a lot of damage of previous episodes, but this more level-headed characterization is five episodes too late.

Overall, this series has been good, and the fifth episode is the closure it needed. Yes, we would like to see a change in the Telltale formula, but it still is quite enjoyable when we have dialogues and characters like these.

Everything has seemed to us very diluted, schematic and, at times, even unjustifiably hasty.

This is not the ending we'd hoped for: for the whole series you will not care about the main villain and things are not going to change here. The feeling, when you are face to face with the ending credits, is that with five main heroes and with their amazing uniqueness, this series needed more time (and maybe more episodes) in order to be as meaningful and remarkable as it could have been.

A finale as uneven as the series itself; a few highlights and more meaningful outcomes to earlier choices are offset by Telltale’s usual problems of pacing and gameplay mechanics.