Hello everyone! Is there a free spot here for a geeky girl like me? Hope so! 😁

So far, I was posting my game reviews under Hive Gaming Community, but I really wanted to finally make my first post in the Geek Zone Community as well, so I took this as an opportunity. I hope my post fits well, and in case it's not suitable for this community, please let me know so I know what to do from now on. Thank you! ❤️

To start with the beginning, I always loved to play games. It's actually one of the earliest passions I discovered, starting from an early age when I didn't even own a phone, laptop, or computer, but played games whether on my cousins' consoles or on my neighbours computers and PSP.

And no, the picture from above it's not a flex, but to show how many games I played so far, even if many of them happened way before owning a Steam account. So the real number it's a lot bigger than that.

Even so, I always did it from pure passion, or as a way to be stress-free and hide from reality for a couple of hours, without thinking about trying to take this passion to the next level.

If there was a college in this industry in my country at that time, then most likely I would have followed it when growing up, as well as look for a possible job further on. Sadly, the gaming industry is still in early access in Romania and considered as a way to have all kinds of issues developed and stay away from social life when in reality many friendships are born through this way and some people socialise a lot more than IRL.

Happily, some things have changed since the Gaming Communities started being created on the chain, getting encouraged to start a YouTube Gaming Channel where I have already uploaded all the gameplays from Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy and you can check the playlist out out here. But I also started writing once in a while game reviews of some of the games I completed lately.

It's true that the motivation to write a game review is a bit lower than actually playing those games because it takes some good hours to write down the review, hours that I could use to play even more games, ha! But my passion for writing does its job to convince me to return from time to time with another game review, where I try to stay away from revealing spoilers and share my experience frankly playing that game, whether it's a new AAA title or some older game.

Today's selection for this game review blog post was Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, a game that I played in June, and even though some time has already passed since then, I still feel very fresh all the memories created while playing GOTG.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is a 2021 action-adventure game developed by Eidos-Montréal and originally published by Square Enix. Set in an original universe based on the Marvel Comics superhero team of the same name, the game's plot follows the Guardians who, while attempting to capture a beast for a wealthy collector, inadvertently trigger a catastrophe which threatens the peace of the galaxy. The player controls the team's self-proclaimed leader, Star-Lord, and issues commands to other Guardians including Drax the Destroyer, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon and Groot. At certain points in the game, the player makes key decisions via dialogue trees that affect the relationships between Guardians and change the outcome of missions. (Source)

First, if you are asking any of my friends or family members about what I loved as a kid, you will most likely get surprised because I've never been that girl with baby dolls, makeup, cooking toys and lots of pink in her life, but actually with cars (lots of cars!), superheroes, comic books, gun toys, and so on!

And since I mentioned the superheroes, it's important to say here that as much as I loved superheroes, I never really kept up with the movies, as I always enjoyed more to play with these bad boys owning all kinds of powers instead of spending some hours watching them do the thing.

The good thing is that every single Supperhero featured in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy has its own story, which can be found out by reading the comics featuring it.

I know there will always be the fight between Marvel and DC and whatever other Superheroes that are not part of any of the two, but speaking about an SF world, sooner or later they all meet each other and face various situations.

For example, I first heard about Lady Hellbender while playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Yes, you heard that right, the universe of Assassin's Creed did meet this one-of-a-kind lady in the game! It happened in some of the side quests you could complete, so if you only followed the main story of the game, you won't remember seeing her.

However, while she is not really a superhero, she does own all kinds of powers and abilities to make her a great character to pop up in the GOTG game, where she's been quite important as well.

Sadly, I can't remember playing other games with superheroes other than completing in full all the Batman collection of games. And that did happen many years back.

However, what I really enjoyed about Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is that it's very different from anything played before. We have both real-life situations and a different world, both human beings and all kinds of creatures, both sad moments and funny moments. Because despite each character having its own story, they also behave differently, remembering Star-Lord (Peter Quill) the charismatic leader with a mixtape full of '80s pop culture references, Gamora, the deadly warrior with a conscience that hides her emotions very well, Drax the Destroyer the brutally honest and comically unaware of metaphors one, Rocket the explosive genius with an interesting attitude, and Groot the calm, kind-hearted, and surprisingly expressive tree despite saying just 3 words... "I am Groot."

The game follows a strict story mode with no side quests or open world mode, that is divided into Prologue + 16 Chapters, where each Chapter has its own world to be explored and situations to face, often leading to a new character to discover and find out its story.

Sadly, speaking about a world with superheroes, of course there are some more emotional moments when you have to face the villains, but the thing that it was very hard to predict what would happen next and did took a while to find out who the real villain is, I found it very interesting and did keep me on the edge of my seat, finishing playing the game a lot sooner than planned even if it had around 18 hrs of gameplay.

Anyway, despite speaking about a Sci-Fi warrior where pretty much everyone owns a superpower or some powerful abilities, GOTG did feel so much different from everything played before, where I got through all emotions during the 18 hrs of gameplay.

The most important part is that at the end of the day, no matter what superpower the characters owned, every single one (no matter their look) showed at some point what it feels like to be human, which made the SF universe seem not so far from real life anymore. And I really loved these moments.

Conclusions 🤔

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy surprised me in all the best ways. Beneath the flashy combat and sarcastic banter lies a game with real heart, character growth, and narrative depth. It’s rare to find a superhero game that takes storytelling this seriously, and even rarer for one to do it with this much style. I didn’t just enjoy the ride, but I even connected with it.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that the writing, the voice acting, the soundtrack, and the team dynamics are all picked out so beautifully. All the soundtrack selections and remarks make the story a lot better, and they had me laughing, tearing up, and loving every moment.

Did you play it? 😁

As I said at the beginning, I try to stay away from revealing any spoilers, so I try to share only my personal thoughts playing this game as well as some background from it, but if you played it, let me know what your thoughts are! I'd love to connect with more people who enjoy similar games to what I play.

NOTE: - all the pictures attached are in-game screenshots taken by me (unless if other stated). 📸 - this article is trying to stay away from revealing spoilers. ⚠️ - this is a personal review and should not be taken as a real advice of either playing the game or not because the opinion might be subjective. 🗯 - this article was written exclusively for the Hive community and its members. ❤️

https://youtu.be/QBn8ST8rELc?si=9OF879sS5HZmScP2

Here is a list of some other games I wrote reviews about and you might like:

.... 20.Forza Horizon 5 🚓 - 5/5 21.Watch Dogs: Legion 💻 - 4/5 22.Far Cry 6 💣 - 5/5 23.inZOI 👧 - 4/5 24.Assassin's Creed Shadows 🥷 - 5/5 25.Call of the Wild: The Angler 🎣 - 4.5/5 26.Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy 💥 - 5/5

^{Gabriela Travels is the FOUNDER of "Festival Mania" who started this community from the passion of attending various festivals and with the purpose of encouraging more people to explore festivals all around the world and share their experiences. At the same time, Gabriela is an independent Graphic Design Freelancer since 2019 completing over 600+ orders in this time and collaborating with various businesses and people from all over the globe. Additionally, Gabriela has her own corner on the internet since 2017 where she writes various articles for her blog, the most popular being the travel ones (300+ articles written on this field), but also approaching other topics as well, like game reviews, lets plays, movie and series reviews, photography posts, cooking recipes and more, boosting the total number of articles written to 750+ blog posts. Gabriela is also a gamer since she was 11 years old and gaming remains one of her biggest passions along with traveling, owning a YouTube channel for each of the two.}

~ @GabrielaTravels ~