Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a game full of rich texture. The voice acting is superb and the abbey’s relationship-building is the perfect chill interlude to the tactically sophisticated card play. The two formats are beautifully intertwined through the accrual of additional cards and abilities, and there’s a genuine sense of satisfaction in deepening both battlefield prowess and social role-playing connections. Midnight Suns is not XCOM — but that’s ultimately its greatest strength. It’s something completely distinct and entirely exceptional.
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Outside of battle, life in the Abbey is full of activities and social interaction with other super heroes that greatly flesh out its RPG elements. The dialogue trees aren’t the most in depth ever created, but they’re fleshed out enough where they help the world feel alive and worth saving from Lilith. The end result is a game that isn’t just a must play for superhero fans, but one that should be experienced by RPG fans in general.
With Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Firaxis has put itself in the league of RPG developers like BioWare, Obsidian, Bethesda, and Larian. Its innovative turn-based hero combat system takes a bit of time to get going, but once it does it makes excellent use of card game mechanics to keep battles fresh, evolving, and unpredictable over the course of an epic-length campaign – bashing enemies into things for increased damage is endlessly entertaining.
There's a lot to love about Marvel's Midnight Suns. The combat offers a rewardingly tactical experience, with a deckbuilding card system ensuring that randomness challenges the player, not frustrates them. Plus, the mission variety and cast of diverse playable characters keep combat fresh across dozens of hours.
Like Nico, Midnight Suns wants to storm into your room and pull you by the arm into the party. Whether that's what every strategy head wants is to be determined. But if you can meet Firaxis on its own terms, you'll be dazzled.
I did not expect to be thinking about this stuff in a game that also encourages me to get the absolute most out of my battlefield resources, in a game that contains a spell which, if used correctly, allows you to rain enemy dogs down from the sky to their thudding detriment. But that's Marvel, I guess, with those flawed heroes whose powers are accompanied by vanities and vulnerabilities. And that's Firaxis, whose teams, when I once visited the studio, worked in little collegiate huddles in a selection of rooms that remind me of the dorms in the abbey, and who know that a good HQ is always more than just a fancy way of accessing a menu.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a game full of rich texture. The voice acting is superb and the abbey’s relationship-building is the perfect chill interlude to the tactically sophisticated card play. The two formats are beautifully intertwined through the accrual of additional cards and abilities, and there’s a genuine sense of satisfaction in deepening both battlefield prowess and social role-playing connections. Midnight Suns is not XCOM — but that’s ultimately its greatest strength. It’s something completely distinct and entirely exceptional.
It's a better superhero game than it is strategy game, but if you're a fan of the MCU, Marvel's Midnight Suns is absolutely essential. Not only is this an ambitious tactics RPG that captures the fast, frothy fun of its comic book source material, but it's also a brilliant marriage of Into The Breach's intellectual conundrums and the turn-stretching power fantasy of Gears Tactics. The best Marvel game by a country mile.