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Marvel's Midnight Suns is a mixed experience, as the strategy gameplay is great, but just about everything else is difficult to enjoy. I don't recommend it, but there are a few positives. The game is a cool mix between a turn-based strategy game, and a deckbuilder. Each hero has a deck of abilities, and during combat each turn you can play three cards, move a hero, and do environmental attacks. Cards cost heroism, which can be gained by using some lower cost cards, and defeating enemies with a "quick" attack refunds you a card play, allowing for more than three actions in a turn. The system gets a bit more complex than that, and the environmental attacks add a nice layer of depth on top of everything. This leads to some awesome combat scenarios, and many of the heroes attacks feel genuine to their character and have dope animations.
That being said, the social sim aspect of this game is horrible. While the main story is alright, after and before missions you go to a hub world where you engage with the heroes in a Persona or Fire Emblem: Three Houses type of way. The writing here is absolutely atrocious; these heroes with storied lore are essentially all written like teenagers unable to properly communicate with each other, and lacking understanding of who they are. Just to give a brief example or two, at night I was invited to the "Emo Kids" club by Nico, Magik, and Dr. Strange, while Blade invited me to a book club with Captain America and Captain Marvel because he's romantically interested in Captain Marvel and wants to get closer to her. These scenarios aren't written in a way that are goofy or enjoyable either, they're just bad. To make matters worse, there are so many of them that even if you skip all of them for the entire main game, this will still be about 20-30% of your playtime, in large part because raising your friendship level with heroes unlocks new passives for them, and improves their capabilities in combat.
Writing complaints aside, I am baffled by how anti-player much of the game design is. For example, want to craft items that help you in combat? You'll be running around the boring hub world pressing "E" on mushrooms and flowers after you're done flirting with your companions post-mission. Want to upgrade an attack in your deck to help you beat the next story mission? Well, unfortunately you don't have enough "heroic essence" to do the upgrade, so you're going to need to grind a few general missions before doing that (there are four or five different currencies that prevent you from becoming stronger in this same way/force you to grind for them). Okay, so you're not into the grind, want to mainline the game's story? Unfortunately you need to complete a general mission before you can do the next mission, try again tomorrow! Hey, welcome back, it's tomorrow, want to do that mission now? Well sadly this main story mission requires you bring Wolverine and Blade with you, and during yesterday's mission both heroes sustained injuries, so Blade will start with 50% HP, and Wolverine will do 50% damage for the first three turns, oh and every other time both heroes draw a card it will be an unplayable "injury" card that does nothing: good luck winning! Oh I forgot to mention, both heroes will be healed in three days time, so instead of failing the mission repeatedly because they're injured, why don't you do another three general missions followed by three days and three nights of bad social sim while they heal?
The game also lacks standard strategy quality of life features, like a fast forward during enemy movement- this gets really annoying with a particular enemy that duplicates itself leading to enemy turns that were, at times, two or three minutes long, with no way to fast forward or skip.
Overall, I think I would've had more fun with Marvel's Midnight Suns if it was just the gameplay followed by a mobile-game-style screen where you upgrade your heroes with one currency, and are able to use who you want, when you want. The gameplay is awesome, but everything else ranges from mediocre to terrible. Even if you're a massive Marvel fan, I don't think you'll like this because these renditions of many of the characters are so poor and childish; meanwhile, if you're a strategy fan there are countless better games to check out.
Not Recommended
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