izigame.me

Midnight Suns is a mixed bag -- almost literally. The game is a mix of three separate components loosely tied together:

Turn-based, tactical strategy that revolves around careful choices of moves and positioning rather than RNG;
An open "world" (a single map, really) with a bunch of collectables and crafting;
A superhero-themed social simulator where you play out slice of life scenes and guess at which responses will make people like you the most.

Of these, the strategy part is the thing that provides the actual entertainment and is what you're paying the price of admission for. The open world bit is just sort of there to keep you busy in between missions, and the social simulator bits... well, I'll come to that later.
The turn-based strategy is fresh and interesting. Despite being made by Firaxis, this is not "XCOM with Marvel heroes" at all -- every attack always hits and you know in advance how much damage you'll do, there's no two-point system for making moves but instead a system where you can reposition one character as much as you want before finalizing (normally only once per turn, though) and the moves you can make each turn are drawn at random from the collective pool of abilities you equipped on your heroes, each of which has their own distinct play style. The battlefield is strewn with environmental hazards that you can bump enemies into for extra damage or instant kills, and every move either generates or consumes "heroism" points, with mundane attacks generating them and high-damage flashy abilities consuming them.
It's challenging in the best sense of the word, and there are so many different heroes, abilities and modifiers that you can have many hours of fun figuring out new strategies for cards and heroes that work well together. At the highest difficulty levels, where enemies retaliate with deadly force, you have to be so careful about what to play, and when, and how, that the game almost starts to feel like a puzzle game where you either play optimally or die horribly -- in fact, the challenges for each hero to unlock their legendary abilities are straight up puzzles. But if you're just here for the superhero power fantasy and puzzling is not your thing, don't worry -- the game has no less than 8 difficulty settings, on a gradual curve from "you basically can't lose" to "make one mistake and it's over", with the higher levels gradually unlocking the more successful you are on the lower levels.
The open world stuff is nothing special; you've seen this a hundred times before. There's a plethora of object collections you can complete and "mysteries" to investigate (which all really boil down to finding even more objects), some parts are blocked off and only opened up later as you've completed other bits, the works. Almost all of it is optional in the sense that the resources you get from this can also be obtained as rewards from missions (unless you really want those palette swaps you can only get from loot chests, I guess) and the bits of the backstory you uncover that really matter end up in conversations and cutscenes anyway, so you can do as much or as little of it as you please. It's not bad, but it's pretty obviously busywork.
And speaking of busywork, we get to the social simulator bits, and this is where things start to unravel. In terms of gameplay, you interact with characters to level up your "friendship", which in turn unlocks passive bonuses and legendary abilities. Lest you think this gives you some kind of opportunity to roleplay being part of your favorite superhero team, you'd best temper those expectations: your responses are limited to "light", "dark" and "neutral" reactions, and you will want to pick the ones that level up your own character and/or friendship as effectively as possible, as anything else basically punishes you. And no, you're not going to be kissing Captain America in the broom closet either, all your relationships (or "friendship levels", more accurately) are strictly platonic. Gazing at the stars is as far as you'll get, which is treated no different from fishing, gathering mushrooms, and all the other exciting things superheroes get to do when they're not punching bad guys through apartment blocks.
Rarely has a high stakes story been so undercut by requiring the player to sit through story vignettes where characters do the most mundane stuff imaginable as part of their downtime -- not by choice but as part of the leveling mechanic. It can lead to serious tonal whiplash where one moment you're returning from a mission where the bad guys have advanced their ridiculously circuitous plot for world domination by leading you into a trap and the team is at its lowest point, and the next moment you're sitting with the monthly meeting of the book club that Blade started because he's too shy to directly ask Captain Marvel out on a date. That's not me making a joke, by the way, this is a thing that actually happens in the game. The problem here is not that the story or the characters are badly written; on the contrary, every character here is faithful to their depiction in the comics. It's just that the interactions are so frequent and at the same time so anemic (and on occasion, animated in such a lackluster way, with characters standing around like zombies) that the best friend you'll have in the game is the button you use to skip the scenes. It's really rather sad when the aforementioned book club subplot ends up as one of the most interesting parts of the (side) story.
As far as recommendations go, even though everything that's not the strategy game severely overstays its welcome, the strategy game is enough to sell it. On PC you have the added bonus that there are mods to reduce the grind and tedium of the other bits, and it's very telling that those mods are among the most popular (well, after the nude mod for the ladies, of course, because gamers). Personally I would be surprised if we ever get a Midnight Suns 2, but I would love to see the ideas on display here make a return in some form or another, even if it's not Marvel themed.