Square Enix’s Guardian of the Galaxy is out today, and given how surprisingly good the game is, a lot more of you are likely to be playing it than you originally intended. The galaxy is a large and sometimes confusing place, especially when you are guarding it. Don’t worry, we’ve put together some helpful tips to help you understand the mess.
Managing a team of galactic outsiders is not easy. If it were, everyone would. While Guardian of the Galaxy offers numerous tutorials that can be accessed at any time from the in-game menu. We’ve rounded up some useful advice that you won’t find in the official snazzy pink and purple interface.
Lime before playing
Guardian of the Galaxy may not be a special dance game, but boy makes you want to dance. With a soundtrack full of 80s hits and a neat huddle feature that fades those hits out in the middle of intense fights, I danced in a chair several times during my first playthrough.
See? Even Kammy, the purple space lama, can’t help it.
Bring a laughing buddy
Guardian of the Galaxy is a fun game. Less than five minutes go by without a clever joke, a bizarre back and forth or a silly speech being made. This level of comedy demands company. I found the game to be a lot more fun when I was by my side with my partner and shared the laughter. This is especially the case in Chapters 10 and 11, which feature an expanded cameo of the funniest character in the universe. I mean man, this character makes me giggle every time they open their mouths.
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Explore every corner in every area
Peter Quill’s scanner sight displays a marker at the top of the screen that shows the direction of your main target as you explore strange new worlds and civilizations. The urge to follow this mark is strong. Ignore it, at least until you’ve covered all of the floor where you are at the moment. In each area there are small nooks and crannies to explore. Some contain hidden collector’s costumes. Others have items that you can use to upgrade perks. Sometimes all you can find is a cool poster that you might have had on your own bedroom wall in the 80s.
The point is, the developers have crammed this game full of cute little Easter eggs, secrets, text logs, and so on. Find her. The universe-threatening danger will wait.
Use Star-Lord’s scanner all the bloody time
One of the Star-Lord’s greatest powers, aside from its ability to shoot a weapon, is its scanning visor. When you activate it, the world will turn red, purple, and teal. Purple Bits are people. Red are things that you don’t have to worry about. Teal are sights. These can be plants that you can search through for fun lore, structural weaknesses that you can exploit with the skills of your teammates to open up new areas, or important interactive objects that you can use, for example, to prevent your team from producing toxic fumes dies.
If you get lost, turn on your visor. If you get stuck, turn on your visor. When you get bored, turn on your visor. Whenever you need to fire your primary weapon, turn off your sight as both of them won’t work at the same time. Otherwise visor.
Hunt materials for crafting benefits like they’ve wronged you
During the game you will find small pieces of rubbish on the floor that you can pick up. These junk pieces are manufacturing components, the key to unlocking perks. Using the Milano’s workbench or those found in the wild, Rocket can create equipment upgrades that will make your space adventures much easier.
The benefits include combat skills like Charged Shot, a stronger attack that stagger enemies, or the Low Life Buff, which doubles your rate of fire when you’re below 25 percent health. More importantly, perks can help make crafting components easier to find, making it easier to purchase additional perks.
Know your teammates’ skills and use them wisely
Your teammates’ skills have been designed to complement each other. For example.
Rocket’s Gravistack grenade, as the name suggests, stacks enemies in one place. What is that good?
Gamora’s staggering wave hits a target and then stumbles enemies behind that target. Together with Rocket’s Gravistack, it’s pretty effective. But wait, there’s more.
Drax’s catathic assault staggered moderately at all enemies in a row. Why don’t you pile that up? And what the heck.
Throw in Groot’s uprooting just to be on the safe side.
It’s easy to get into the rhythm of spamming your teammates’ skills every time they are available. Do not do that. Knowledge, to know, to know, means to live, live, live longer.
Don’t be afraid of hand-to-hand combat
As Peter “Star-Lord” Quill, your main weapons are your Element Guns. They either fire normal projectiles or a series of special elemental attacks. You can also beat up aliens. While hand-to-hand combat does a lot less damage than shooting in the beginning, there are times when punching and kicking are much more efficient.
For example, freezing an enemy with your Element Gun makes them much more susceptible to melee damage. If you’re fighting near a ledge, a well-placed blow or two can throw your enemy over the side. Some enemies are simply weaker when hit than when shot. So hit faces or whatever the alien creature you are fighting has that most closely resembles a face.
Make clever use of the special abilities of your Element Guns
What would Star-Lord be without his Element Guns? Probably dead somewhere in space, his blue corpse floated endlessly through the void with a silent expression on his face. The Element Guns are powerful weapons that become more and more powerful as the game progresses. At first only able to fire simple projectiles, Peter soon learns to harness the powers of ice, electricity, magma and wind. These special elemental skills are useful outside of combat for solving puzzles by creating ice platforms, melting blocked passages, or dragging objects from a distance. They are also very versatile in fights.
I mentioned freezing enemies and then crushing them with your fists. Certain enemies have shields that are particularly weak against certain elements. Electricity can stun them, jumping from enemy to enemy in the process. Magma has a damage-over-time effect and is particularly effective against oversized creatures. Finally wind: sweet, sweet wind. Wind pulls enemies from afar, bringing them right in front of Peter Quill. Those snipers far in the distance? Yoink. If you draw enemies towards you, not only will they be vulnerable to blows, if you stand on the edge of a precipice, if you catch up with them, they will instantly fall to their death. So good.
Play through more than once
As you play through the game you will be presented with choices. Some are minor dialog variations, such as: Others are more important, like deciding who between Groot and Rocket will try to sell to the Monster Queen. While none of these options will change the end of the game, they all feature different interactions, new dialogues, and can change cutscenes significantly. I repeated a chapter yesterday for a video post and discovered that choosing a different option than the first time resulted in an almost entirely different scene.
Don’t sweat the decisions. Just be prepared to play through more than once to experience all that the game has to offer. Once you’re done, the New Game + option will be available, or you can just use the chapter picker to go back and change your selections.
Have fun!
The developers made it easy. When you’re not having fun playing Guardian of the Galaxy, you should have your fun gland examined by a licensed doctor.
Or an unlicensed space llama.
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