Marvel's Midnight Suns

Seems like Midnight Suns is a victim of The Avengers casting a bad reputation on superhero games, we saw the same thing happening with Guardians of the Galaxy a game that didn't sell very well despite being quite excellent. It's unfortunate that this game was a flop, Firaxis expanded their scope a lot here and came out with a quality title, but perhaps Turn Based Tactics doesn't quite land with the Marvel crowd.

Walking into this one I was expecting XCOM 3. I was wrong, it's really not the same. Actually it's hard to compare to a specific game because it kind blends in a few things with the abilities being played with cards and the small deck/reshuffle aspect is very much in line with Roguelike deckbuilders. It's got some XCOM blood in it as it's turn based tactics, but it doesn't feature cover which does feel like a standard thing in the genre. The card playing is much more important with chaining "quick" cards and getting the most of your turn which is limited to 3 card plays. The large cast of superhero all have pretty unique style and abilities, so who you are bringing into each mission is going to keep things varied as far as tactics goes.

What I did not expect is this game to be Persona-like. In between missions you have this hub where you will build your relationships which each hero, there is really endless amount of dialogue actually for each one and it's about 50% of the game just having conversations with them. I had in mind that this would be non-stop missions and minimal management in between them, they really invested a lot of time into the story and just the random chatter they could have. The dialogue feels a little stiff at first, but eventually all of them kinda of grow on you with some pretty funny moments to unveil. Raising your friendship level will grant them better passive abilities, so it's definitely something you will want to do as much as possible.

The gameplay loop is fairly good, after mission you will unlock new cards and will want to edit your deck (or upgrade your cards) and the progression is relatively slow but definitely makes you learn every ability quite well. You'll also upgrade your hub with new devices that allows to get more benefits, there's definitely a lot of things to do in the game but I do admit it gets a little repetitive in the 3rd part of the game. On the whole it took me 47 hours to complete the game, a fairly long adventure so you should set up a good amount of play hours if you want to see the game to completion.

On the less positive side is the performance of the game, I played on PC and I have way above the maximum settings and it still was chugging when there was too many enemies or animations going on. It doesn't seem that this is Firaxis expertise and the optimization definitely could have been better. And since the game wasn't quite the success expected, they stopped patching it eventually so that never really got perfected. However it was interesting to see them dabble in third person exploration and deeper storylines, it's a little bit of a risk for the studio I feel. They deserved a better outcome for this, having released several classic games it's little crazy that not more people are at least interested to see how it turned out. I personally thought it was an excellent strategy title and satisfied my desire for one, I generally don't care for Marvel movies much but they can make some pretty good video games. It will be interesting to see where the studio takes things to next, 99% chance this never gets a sequel as it's for sure a heavy loss for Firaxis and 2K.

Midnight Suns is a fun game, but the story and characters do their best to try and ruin it. The plot feels overly long when the main characters rehash the same arguments over and over, and the heroes never accomplish anything for the vast majority of the game. They're handed loss after loss after loss, and it just gets boring. The game is about twice as long as the story can support.

My rating is low relative to the amount of joy I found in Midnight Suns; it dominated my time and attention for the first two thirds, and in the best way; no game has Tetris Effect'ed me so hard in so long, and that's because the core gameplay loop is just awesome. It's a mix of the long-term base-building strategy and collection of XCOM, the relationship building of Persona, the on-foot combat of Fire Emblem, and even the card game strategy of Slay The Spire and a little bit of the Krypt exploration from the last few Mortal Kombats. Combined with the Marvel aesthetic, which still tickles my fantasy even being totally over the MCU, this is exactly my kind of game, and most of its gameplay it nails with aplomb. The difficulty curve and ability upgrades scale damn near perfectly; it always feels like there's something new to find, some way to tweak your builds for maximum efficiency, some way to play each battle perfectly with minimal casualties on the highest difficulty for the most rewards. It's a lot more casual than FE or XCOM due to no permadeath and little penalty for your units being knocked out, but there's no real complaints when the controller is in my hands, other than a lack of enemy variety to match the brilliant player unit variety.

But everything outside of the combat is extremely shaky, especially the story. It's not the end of the world that it's prone to power creep and plot elements being pulled out of thin air because these are both sadly big problems in the Marvel Universe in general. However, even within the context of Midnight Suns as a standalone story, it is incredibly poorly structured and portrayed. Why do we see the Suns and Avengers bickering about who should be in charge, to have to wait until the second act for our main character to claim to take the reins (which has been the case throughout the game anyway), only for the game to double-back to the in-fighting a few hours later? Why are all but maybe two story missions seemingly doomed to failure? Your team just never gets a victory, everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it undermines all your actions when you're never rewarded for them in the story. I was hopeful that the backstory surrounding our hero, villain and the rest of their family would go somewhere, but the ending just plain makes our antagonist's actions make no sense. The whole narrative progression feels completely jumbled, even as it relies on a lot of tropey scenarios; you can discover why Lilith made a deal with Chthon by exploring the Abbey, but dialogue during the endgame seems to suggest you were only meant to find out as part of a mandatory conversation then, so discovering it earlier just leaves it lingering in the background until the game remembers to bring it up again. And so on and so forth. Short of Dying Light 2's madlibs plot, it's one of the most incoherent portrayals of what should be a straightforward story, and it gets seriously annoying as the game goes on.

Sadly, the Persona-esque relationship building does very little to be engaging on its own either, with limited character explorations or side-story hooks and way too much fellating the main character for demonstrating the most basic courtesies. Combined with modern Marvel's penchant for mining the MCU style of humour no matter what, and outside of a few storylines, it was difficult to get attached to any one character when none of them were all that distinct. It's a far cry from the GOTG game which owed a lot to the movies but did its own thing; this is Three Houses with a Marvel tint on top and it is lagging behind both in charm and intelligence, and is even kinda skimpy on the fun Marvel easter eggs you might expect. Altogether, it makes the package very lop-sided in where the substantive quality lies.

Every other issue is minor but adds up over the course of a long campaign, exacerbated by the annoying lack of meaningful progression and seemingly random pacing in the story itself. Wandering around the Abbey to manage your decks, gear and base can get a bit rote, the UI is generally smart around letting you plan what upgrades to get, certainly moreso than 3H, but what it is missing gets annoying as the game's complexity increases. The presentation is ultimately very B-grade, with facial animations going back to the Mass Effect style of showing one of four emotions for an entire line reading, robbing scenes of a lot of life even as the voice cast do brilliant work. Autosaves are plentiful, and thank god, because so are the glitches. The Hunter is an oddly portrayed character even by RPG main character standards, being mostly a fish out of water but sometimes making pop culture references before missing other basic vernacular and metaphors just a few lines later. About the only aspect of the game that is universally brilliant outside of the combat is the music, not only an excellent mixture of metal and orchestra with very MCU-like motifs, but also uses a dynamic "building blocks" system to vary the soundtrack during individual fights, adding lots of life to what is inherently a bloated campaign.

I loved most of my time with Midnight Suns, but it has too many basic issues for how long and demanding it is to get any sort of high marks. Outside of the gameplay, it feels dreadfully behind the curve, looking and feeling like a 2009 action RPG more than a modern day blockbuster, and what ambition it does have beyond the license, and its obvious inspirations, feels inspired but mostly misguided. It is far from a holistic experience, which doesn't make it bad by any means, but definitely keeps it from any sort of greatness, even if it's still my exact kind of game.