Marvel's Midnight Suns

Fun gameplay. Great writing and voice acting. Needs optimizing in the most dire way.

Really liked it - but I feel like you'd need to be some combination of a tactics game fan, a visual novel fan, and a Marvel fan to enjoy this. The tactical missions are great - lots of unique heroes to experiment with and optimise. I enjoyed it enough to put off ending the game to fully learn each hero and grind out their complete decks. The base/talky sections are probably more divisive, but I enjoyed getting to know this game's iteration of familiar Marvel characters, and was pleasantly surprised at the characterisation your unique-to-this-game player hero gets.

Very few games that I enjoy get the honor of not only being good, but memorable. I will never forget this game. Midnight Suns is a meaty strategy RPG love letter to those of us wasting away waiting for an XCOM1/2 sequel, all made by developers I can only assume are huge fans of Mass Effect and Dragonage. The world is doomed, and a small group super-heroes resurrect the prophesized chosen one to put an end to the chaos. You assume this role as The Hunter; a customizable character for to control as the team's leader, this game's Commander Shepherd. By day you lead various iconic Marvel characters into battle against Hydra Soldiers, Demons, Vampires (with an I), Vampyres (with a y), eldritch creatures, and a small collection of Supervillains. In these mission you play cards from a deck of ~24; 8 for each hero on your 3-person squad per mission. These cards might deal damage because you hit them with a sword, or they might deal damage because you hit an enemy with another enemy. They might heal or buff, draw extra cards, delete extra cards, make pits to hell appear in the ground, or cause you to devour an enemy for extra health. All the things you need to defeat your foes of all sizes. When you return from these missions you get the night to interact with your newly found family of do-gooders, hearing their stories, their traumas, and inevitably; becoming bestest friends. Then hit the bed and get ready to do it again tomorrow. Get up, pick someone to train with to boost your xp gains, advance your relationship with your chosen sparing partner, and collect a powerful buff to use on their next mission. Chat up everyone who's got something to say and pick a new mission to undertake. In the midst of all this you can also explore The Abbey, your stronghold and home-base for the duration of the campaign. This is a purely peaceful, narrative driven and optional side of the game where you can plunder extra loot, -both cosmetic and practical- and learn about the history of the major characters in the narrative. With how massive this game truly is, I find it hard to believe I can summarize it in a few short paragraphs but it can't go without stating; Midnight Suns is long, and very dense. Practically every member of your massive 12 (16 with DLC) member team has no fewer than 30 unique interactive dialogues. Even when you aren't speaking with them directly, your team will converse on SuperLink; a super-hero message board you can open to see what everyone has been talking about lately from feuding over the tribulations of sharing space together, to grim insights into the state of the world as an apocalypse draws nearer. Aside from simply chatting everyone up and learning more about them, each character also has several layers of progression you can work on to increase their combat effectiveness. Firstly there is your relationship with them, increased by sparing, joining hang-outs, inviting them out, and conversing. When your relationship hits certain milestones with them they gain: a passive ability, special abilities that lets them team up with another hero for great effect, an upgrade to their passive, and finally a legendary ability that can only be used once per mission. Secondly is their hero level, which ascends from 1 to 25 (and beyond in ng+) as you use them in combat or train with them; raising their health and damage, nothing too fancy here. Then there is the meatiest part of the progression; deckbuilding. Each hero has their own allotment of cards allowing them to do various things on the battlefield from simply inflicting damage, to applying debuffs, to launching enemies in all directions like a pinball game. Each card can be enhanced, making it superior in one way or another; then, they can be modified adding a random assortment of additional effects of various quality. And if all that wasn't enough, the final layer of progression is a series of minor stats you can improve per hero over time providing them what are minor benefits early one, and enormously powerful ones later on. All that is to say; there is a massive amount of stuff to do, too much even. The amount of effort it takes to spend that quality time with each hero, to select their abilities and invest the resources into them. It is a lot. That being said, the game is thankfully insanely fun. The massive grind wouldn't be at all tolerable if it didn't end up paying out dividends pretty much instantly. To see your hero pals going berserk on the battlefield, benefiting from all the work you've put into them, learning about them and giving them sweet powers to use; is all very very satisfying. It certainly has it's limits, and so I'd personally recommend skipping out on the DLC for a first playthrough as the added 4 characters can be a lot to handle on top of the huge vanilla roster. Before I praise this game one last time, I will throw out a few thorns I felt prevented Midnight Suns from being a true masterpiece for me. First, leveling up your relationship with your team is insanely time-consuming if that is the sole thing you are working on. You might play a dozen missions to level up your friendship with a hero a single time thanks to lockouts allowing you to do activities with them that raise your relationship with them. Second, some missions (at least on the hardest difficulty) can be outright impossible with bad RNG. The way drawing cards works can sometimes screw you over so badly that you simply cannot win. And on the note of not winning, my final complaint; losing feels pretty bad. Compared to games like XCOM where a loss is a loss and you incur penalties for poor performance; in Midnight Suns, a loss means one of three things: you either reload your save from the beginning of that mission, reload your save from before you went on the mission at all, or quit the game. It feels like it would have been easy to at least let optional mission fail and return you to The Abbey with some sort of penalty instead of the game canonically being a string of victories one after another. Anyways, back to the praise. Midnight Suns was awesome. I laughed and cried, I felt empowered, and can't remember the last time a game gripped me so completely that I went to bed unable to sleep due to the excitement of waking up and playing it again the next day again and again. An all-timer for me. Breaks my hear there will likely never be a sequel.

Do not care about the corpo reviews, I waited until this game was 9.99 to show my disinterest before attempting it, and I was correct. You had the opportunity to make one of the greatest ARPG's known to gaming and you chose to throw it away to do something no one asked for. This game was a commercial flop because no one wanted to control marvel super hero's with trading cards. That is the dumbest game design decision made in the last two decades. Take the most action based franchise on the planet and reduce it to Magic: The Gathering. The people who made this decision I hope moved to their true calling in finance software design and left gaming for the gamers. Someone please make a Marvel ARPG that we'll actually want to play. Story is good, only redeeming quality.

Came for a deckbuilding game, stayed for "Your mother" oneliners

WHY U NO LET ME SMOOCH!?!?!

Really really enjoy this game. It's a shame they are not doing more season passes, feels like a missed chance having a Midnight Suns game without Moonknight in it. Please make more games like this!

Visually, it’s certainly not the best-looking game; the simulation-style gameplay is very prominent, and the characters sometimes deliver truly cringeworthy lines. But it feels amazing to see all these Marvel heroes together. They talk about past and new adventures, the game is packed with Marvel lore and references, their abilities really let them shine, and the story is actually pretty cool. I didn't expect to enjoy this game as much as I did. And even though it (unfortunately) isn't for everyone, I still recommend giving it a try!