Marvel's Midnight Suns Game Review
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When Firaxis said they were making a Marvel game, many fans, including myself, were very surprised. A team known for their tactical skills in the XCOM series taking on the most popular brand in the world seemed like an odd choice, and then they said that Marvel's Midnight Suns would be a card game on top of that. I was skeptical, and after thirty hours of playing, I'm still very skeptical about what Midnight Sun has to offer.
First things first: Marvel's Midnight Suns is not a follow-up to XCOM. If you think this will be a deep and detailed simulation of tactics, you will be very disappointed. This is just because I wanted Midnight Suns to give me more in terms of tactics, but it never did. The other thing I want to say is that I really, really hope you like the Marvel characters, because if you don't like the insanely broad and safe writing that Joss Whedon made popular with the wink-and-nudge "jokes" that the MCU has put at the forefront of all its movies, you are not going to get anything out of this game.
Even though that sounds very bad, I really enjoyed my time with the Midnight Suns. So let's get started with the review.
Based loosely on the Midnight Sons comic arc from the 1990s, the game starts with the evil organization Hydra bringing back the all-powerful demon Lilith. Lilith is a pain in the neck for superheroes everywhere because she can easily corrupt and control them. The Midnight Suns are a secret group of heroes made up of former Avengers and people who worked with them. They have sworn to protect the world if Lilith ever comes back from the dead. The Hunter is the team's secret weapon, which is good news.
The Hunter is a character made just for the game. He is a blank slate who happens to be Lilith's child. When Hydra brings Lilith back to life, the Midnight Suns break open the Hunter's "break in case of emergency" tomb. This lets the player step into the world and make their own legend. On paper, this sounds pretty cool, but in practice, I found it to be a lot of work. But I'll talk more about that later.
The Midnight Suns then work together to find threats from Hyrdra, fight important battles in which new characters join the team, and get closer as a group as they move toward defeating Lilith. If you know anything about how Marvel works, The novel is written with such regard and understanding of the characters that you can't help but care about what happens to them, even though the main story lines won't truly surprise you. Firaxis is a systems developer, but after seeing how well they handled the story depth in one of the most complicated media franchises being made today, I definitely want to see more of this in their next games.
But wow, Midnight Suns really makes you forget about tactics. I didn't go into the game expecting it to be a reskin of XCOM. Instead, I was most interested in the game itself. I didn't expect to find a full-fledged role-playing game and relationship simulator inside. I was quickly let down when I found out that this part of the game was the most important.
The game moves along in a pretty steady way. Every day, you'll look around The Abbey, which is your superhero hideout. It has your bedroom, a training ground, a lounge, a bar, a workshop, and a lot of other cool things. You can unlock new items and cards by using upgrade points and artifacts you find on missions. Over time, you'll unlock a lot of upgrades that will make your team stronger.
Then you'll pick a mission from the table of war. Some are non-essential, wide missions that give different rewards and currencies that can be used to upgrade, while others are story beats that introduce new heroes and villains, usually in a more dramatic way.
And when the battle is over, you can go back to The Abbey and "hang out" with a hero of your choice to get closer to them. These get-togethers are kind of weird because most of the characters are pretty one-dimensional and the conversations rarely go beyond surface-level small talk. When the Hunter has the personality of wet bread, these moments are just really awkward, even though you can choose how to talk to him to go down a good or bad path that will give you access to different abilities and upgrades.
Even though I don't have a problem with how these systems work, I think the game is very unfair in how much it wants you to enjoy this relationship-building system. To use powerful combo moves in battle, you need to raise your friendship level. However, watching TV with Ghost Rider or hanging out with Blade by the pool and having these shallow conversations was not at all fun and took away from the tactics.
And did you notice that I haven't even talked about how battles work? That's because in the first eight hours I played the game, I only won about seven or eight fights. That's how much Midnight Suns is based on its RPG and relationship systems. I signed up for over-the-top superhero battles, not to plan a surprise party for a Marvel character I've never even heard of.
The fighting system in Midnight Suns is actually pretty good. Because superheroes are almost impossible to kill, it gets rid of grid-based positioning and cover in favor of a card battle system. Each turn, you can play three cards that let your heroes do cool things and beat up their enemies. To win on the battlefield, you need to know how to combine your heroes' cards and push your enemies into each other or into environmental hazards.
You can only move once per turn, so even though there is no grid, positioning is very important when setting up quick actions, knockbacks into the environment, and getting ready to use AOE attacks. When Spider-Man jumps off a dumpster to hit a fool in the face, and then Ghost Rider uses his car to run over three Hydra agents who are perfectly positioned, it feels amazing and much crazier than any other tactics game I've played.
I also really like the deck-building part of the game, which keeps things very simple for the player and makes the whole thing easy to understand. Each hero you bring into battle has a few cards that can be used to attack, help, or hurt the hero. As you learn about new cards by researching artifacts, you can just combine copies of that card to make a better one. So it's easy to make a strong team and give them cards that work well together. It didn't take me long to find my favorite hero combinations that kept my team healthy and did a lot of damage.
It's fun to fight. It's fun to find new cards and upgrades. Unlocking the upgrades for the abbey is fun, even when it comes to learning how they work. But the style and trappings of the relationships will either work for you or not, and I think that depends on how much you like the MCU. Even though Midnight Suns is not trying to be a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) game, you can't help but see some characters as bad copies of their movie counterparts. Then, when characters from the background show up and are nothing like their movie selves, it's jarring. Add to that a bunch of characters that most people probably won't even know, and it gets a little annoying.
Is the game Marvel's Midnight Suns good? I don't believe that. I think it's fun and has good tactics, but the RPG and relationship parts are more important. Your enjoyment of those parts depends way too much on how much you care about the Marvel formula, and I don't feel like there's enough of a draw for me to sit through hours of tedious conversations just to get a side of tactics. Your experience may be different, but I think this game will be remembered by many as an interesting experiment that other games will try to copy. Those games will be better because Midnight Sun has taken risks.
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