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.