Marvel's Midnight Suns

MMS is a strange game to characterize. It’s as if three separate development teams were tasked with designing a game, with one team tasked to design an open-world RPG with puzzles, stage-gated progressions, one-time set-based collectibles, and respawning harvestable resources centered on17th century Salem witch-based fantasy. Then another team set out to create a friendship simulator centered around Marvel characters. And finally, the last team was tasked with creating something that the people who bought the game thought they were getting: an arena-based card-driven battler featuring Marvel characters, with research, base-building, and deck-building components outside of combat. The game itself is broken into day and night cycles. As a glimpse as to what the gameplay looks like, I present a typical one-day slice as follows: DAY PHASE 0) Wake up and then find and pet your dog (which gives bonus resources somehow) 1) check your social media feed (which may contains some colorful posts and/or a friendship level-up request from one of the characters), 2) walk around the “Abbey” to pick up the DAY spawn of resource globes (not sure how these are explained), 3) go to the forge and select abilities/cards (up to two cumulatively) for the three characters you fought with yesterday, 4) raise your research level if yesterday’s battle rewarded with you an “artifact” 5) research some new tech at the forge, 6) go to “Central Ops” to either launch solo missions or get the rewards from said missions (these missions are conducted absent your intervention), 7) walk into the library to see if new books need to be read, 8) wander outside of the “Abbey” to the “Abbey Grounds” to explore the grounds, pick any respawned flowers, and open respawned chests, 9) back at the Abbey, check the mirror table to see what your options are for today’s mission, 10) go to the training yard to train with one of your teammates (resolves instantaneously) , 11) merge two identical character-cards, thus yielding an upgraded card (to be used as part of your deck in battle), 12) run back and forth from the forge to the training yard to craft any cards you need to do Step 11, 13) add/edits mods to existing cards (note that outside of combat, this step may take more cumulative time than all the other steps combined), 14) craft one-time use cards in the forge and/or library, 15) talk to all of the characters who are indicating that they have something to say you (to gain friendship and/or alignment points) 16) one of your characters may engage in a lengthy fight designed to raise experience (not advised) 17) select three characters to go on the day’s mission and enter the fight (thus ending DAY phase) NIGHT PHASE 18) walk around the “Abbey” to pick up the NIGHT spawn of resource globes (they respawn when we are out to battle somehow), 19) if the moon is waxing go all around the abbey grounds harvesting a special plant which only has a chance to spawn in certain spots, 20) talk to all of the characters who are indicating that they have something to say you (to gain friendship and/or alignment points), 21) as decided by the game somehow, you may have the opportunity to join a 1-1 “Hangout” (to increase friendship and/or alignment points) or to attend a “Club” meeting (including Book Club), 22) if it has been a while since you last pet the cat, go to spots in the Abbey in which the cat might be at, and pet it (which gives bonus resources somehow) 23) Go to sleep Do the above over and over until the game is over, noting that Step 17 (the actual fighting part) can be a general mission, which you may use to grind, or a Story mission, which drives the game forward. It is noted that I left out a fair number of things from the above, and that not all of the above is available right from the start, but you get the point. My impressions below are based on my one playthrough at the Heroic 2 difficulty level (which is higher than the base difficulty, but a fair bit lower than the max difficulty). Pros: +++ The arena-based combat, driven by the deck-building absolutely works. +++ Graphics throughout the game, including the (unneeded) “Abbey Grounds”, the cutscenes, and the battle animations bring the cast and world to life. ++ Voice acting is pretty good. ++ The overarching main story is compelling enough, though it is somewhat diluted by the endless conversations. + The general and story missions have good diversity in terms of objectives (though most are just kill everything I guess) + The base-building aspects (research, running ops, card crafting, etc.) are decent enough and welcome. YMMV: +/- Roster count is high, topping off at 12 + MC. You are provided good incentive to bring each character on missions and to curate their decks (and some characters are mandatory on given missions, so you ignore them at your own peril) However, this large roster does get burdensome at the end. I would have been happy with a few less characters. +/- The leveling system sees a) your entire team be no more than 3 levels behind your MC and b) your enemies level up with you. As such, leveling up is largely pointless. I would have preferred some sort of slow-moving doom-clock tied into enemy strength. Anything to avoid the game design where everything I fight (in my next combat) gets stronger the second I level up. Cons: --- Save/load times were way too high. Not sure if this just my machine or what, but this aspect became a real drawback, especially when trying to fish for mods. In a similar vein, the graphics would glitch out anytime I entered a new area, wasting 3 or 4 seconds and disorienting movement. --- The Abbey Grounds were impressive visually and the story about witches was OK. However, in the end, this whole aspect ended up just being a bloated time-filler. The rewards from completing this section were simply a bunch of chests, almost all of which were delivered at the same time (noting that the chests only contain cosmetic things and/or generic resources you can get from elsewhere). --- Harvesting herbs was beyond tedious and ultimately very unnecessary. This isn’t Skyrim. --- Mods on your cards was a great idea with the worst implementation possible. The mods you draw/redraw are random. Rerolling mods also quickly gets progressively more expensive (for some reason). So, you either need to a) accept your random, typically crappy mod, b) spend forever grinding for resources to maybe reroll something decent or c) save-scum, requiring many lengthy save/loads. I chose c) which obviously angered me. -- There were three “clubs”, including a jump-the-shark Book Club. Not sure WTH the developers were thinking here. All of these clubs could have been cut and the content greatly reduced to include only those parts needed for the main story. -- Way too much conversation, requiring “guess what the dev wants me to say” player input. Guess the wrong thing and you either lose friendship or need to reload. Since those were unappealing, I used a guide, which is also undesirable and irritated me. Summary: The deck-building, base-building (for the most part), and combat in this game are fantastic. The friendship stuff (conversations, hangouts, havens, gifts) is OK to a point, but ultimately feels overemphasized by a factor of 2 or 3. The Abbey Grounds portion of the game is completely unneeded and just adds bloat to the game as a whole. Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game a lot. I would love to do another run on a harder difficulty, but the thought of slogging through the Abbey Grounds stuff and all of those endless back-and-forth conversations is too much to bear. Still, if you are a Marvel fan and like deck-building and arena style combat, then this game is a wonderfully unique experience, as long as you can stomach the time-wasting nonsense that accompanies it. Overall: 7.0/10 Noting that absent the exploration nonsense and the copious, never-ending conversations, this game would have easily been a 9 or 9.5.

Deep strategic gameplay combined with an interesting story. Only weak point is sometimes the dialogue

Very fun combat, good story and a lot of dialog if you do the friendship stuff, which gets kinda too much imo. The game ran well except for some stutters, but the Endboss fight was laggy af, idk who optimzed it but damn. Still a good game overall.

Watch out, super addictive. Nice twist to the card battler. The dating sim part also enjoyable. Nice animations. And you can live your superhero vibe.

Excellent

Fun game. Slightly grindy but still challenges consistently as found in XCOM. Doesnt quite scratch the exact same itch as XCOM but tickles the brain the same. Alot of tactical gameplay, nil strategic gameplay. As others say, the dialougue is kinda milktoast and easily forgotten. The Marvel IP is doing alot of heavy lifting rather than on it's own story. Looks greats, plays good on my system. With the exception of the final mission where the fps tanked but could fix easily by reloading the game.

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