Marvel has been trying to make its foray back into video games in the past five years or so. From the lackluster The Avengers to the critical and commercial success of Insomniacs Spider-Man games, the quality has been all over the place. Firaxis games of XCOM fame, decided to take a crack at the darker side of the Marvel Universe with Midnight Suns.
Despite sharing a name with an already established super team, this game gives us a new and large group of heroes to work with. Classic Avengers characters such as Iron Man and Captain Marvel, mystics in Doctor Strange and Nico Minoru, mutants including Wolverine and Magik, as well as some dlc and offbeat characters. All of them are voiced superbly with a ton of knowledge and jokes about each other and their pasts. Blade’s mild obsession with Captain Marvel is fun character building.
While playing you will build friendship levels between your main POV character The Hunter and the rest of the Suns. As you level the friendship, rewards are unlocked at every new level culminating in unlocking the ultimate ability of the character once max friendship is reached. You are also able to traverse the grounds the Abbey, your home base, to unlock new areas, find secrets, unlock chests and new hangout spots to level the friendships quicker.
The exploration and unlocks of the Abbey is a whole section into itself. You can upgrade the training yard, giving you a chance to increase battle stats and upgrade cards. You can also heal teammates and take them into a battlegrounds to increase their level. The main area of the Abbey you will visit is the Forge. This is Strange and Starks main hangout. In here you can unlock new cards after a mission, upgrade the training yard, purchase battle items, view all of the Hunter’s unlocked suits and view various items from the Marvel Universe. While there are a lot of upgrade systems in place, they are all manageable and easy to understand. I think it helps that you have to go to an in game location to access the menus, it makes it less of a spreadsheet simulator and more of an upgrade system. On the main floor you have the barracks, the bar and game room, the Intel station, used to send characters on individual missions for rewards, the library, also used for battle items, and the War Room, used to select missions.
The main part of the game that either turned players off or intrigued them was the card based combat system. I was hesitant due to this at first, but after many hours I love it. Instead of the percentage based action movement of XCOM. You have a heroism based card system. By defeating enemies with basic attack cards, you build up heroism that can be used for high power attack cards. It makes you consider the heroes you are bringing to each battle to make sure you can balance generating heroism, healing, and damage output. The system turns each battle from predictable to always having to think on your feet.
Since I was playing the Xbox One version of the game that came out a year after the Series X and PS5 versions, the graphics had a little downgrade mostly around the Abbey. There is some stutter and framrate drops while running around the Abbey and entering new areas. I always stutter for a few seconds while entering the Forge. The battles went smoothly up until the end of the game when I would attack an enemy, no animation would play, the enemy would die, but still be standing on the battlefield. While this did not affect gameplay, it was a visual glitch that was hard to look past.
Overall, I highly recommend this game and think it is one of the best Marvel has. If you are a turn based combat fan, a Marvel Comics fan, or just enjoy a solid game give this one a shot. I may review the dlc and characters at a later date if there is desire for that.