Marvel's Midnight Suns is a game of two halves.
The first half is a fun, brilliant, and surprisingly deep turn-based strategy game that sees you building and upgrading the decks of about a dozen characters from the Marvel universe. This half of the game is remarkably well made and genuinely feels replayable for a hundred hours. There was always something new to learn when it came to building decks, positioning my heroes, upgrading their abilities, and many others, so the gameplay loop never felt tedious for the 35~ish hours that I spent with the game. Mix that in with some stellar animations and sound design that made every single one of the Marvel heroes feel unique, and all I can say is that I have almost nothing bad to say about this part of the game. The only negative remark I can find for it is the fact that decks HAVE to be a certain size (no wiggle room) and that you can only have a max of each type of ability (max 4 attacks, for example). That is the only thing that slightly hinders the player's creativity in an otherwise remarkably well-designed strategy game.
The other half of this game is a dreadfully dull and pointless life sim game that sees you building up relationships with these characters. You can also buy skins for everyone, explore the grounds of your home base, and slightly customize the look of your room. Every single one of these aspects feels tacked on in the worst possible way. I am already not the biggest fan of modern Marvel's writing. The jokes that feel crammed in to retain audience attention are present here as well. Tony Stark will babble on for about 12 hours on how he is scared of the spooky mansion, with the joke never properly landing. Any sense of urgency that is lost with the inclusion of said jokes is present here as well. And the biggest problem being that the game is missing the most important part of what makes some of these awful lines actually work in the movies: the banter between the actors and their expressions. Most of the lines in Marvel's Midnight Suns were clearly read by the voice actors when working alone in a sound booth. So there is no way of them playing off of one another or bringing any sort of physical comedy into the scene. The jokes either land or they don't, and for me, 99% of the ones that I heard before I decided to start skipping cutscenes absolutely did not land.
In fact, that is the only good thing about this game's cutscenes: you can skip all of them and just focus on the fun parts of the game. Which, unfortunately, makes about 50% of this game feel like redundant weight that almost manages to drown and destroy all of its great parts.
6/10
