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Marvel's Midnight Suns is a turn-based strategy / deckbuilding hybrid that brings together some of the most popular characters from the similarly-named comics alongside a wide ensemble of lesser known superheroes in order to fight an increasingly popular villain of today's gaming world: Lilith, the Mother of All Demons. As such, the game leans heavily into eldritch horror and magical elements, something rather rare for a Marvel game, while still retaining some tech elements most often delivered by Iron Man, Spider-Man or Bobby Reyes.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2903957113
The Marvel gang acts as a supporting cast for the game’s true protagonist - the Hunter - whose customizable nature enables you to explore a number of different builds depending on the alignment, collar and card decisions you make along the way. Each day you choose to go on a mission, but there’s never any forced progression (you can choose to do an infinite number of secondary missions and not progress the story if you prefer), which enables you to explore the hundreds of optional conversations, arcane chests, mysteries and optional activities at your own pace.
During your adventures, you will run into iconic villains like Venom or Sabretooth, corrupted by cosmic horror influences and making a recurring appearance as minibosses. You will help heroes along the way and unlock them as playable characters, each with their own synergies and specialties. The game’s physical mechanics, environment, buffs and debuffs will seem a bit shallow compared to more hardcore TCG hybrids like Slay the Spire, but provide a few stimulating concepts to play with for newcomers the genre. Regardless of whether you are a min-maxer or just a casual marvel collectionist taking a dip into another yarn featuring their favorite characters, it will take you well over 50 hours to finish the game’s story. Along the way, you will find quite a few satisfying eureka moments, whether it’s building up a perfect engine of Quick cards into a board-clearing Heroic or shoving a fragile opponent into the perfect chain reaction. For a while, you will even be mesmerized by how every card has a corresponding animation, the more powerful ones displaying impressive cinematics that show Marvel heavy hitters go into full Super Sayan mode.
Positioning your heroes correctly, using explosives and props for area attacks after having exhausted your card-based relocators will sometimes prove critical to winning engagements, particularly on the higher difficulty levels on the game’s sliding scale (the difficulty can be adjusted at any time for varying rewards and challenges). While the general missions fall into a number of formulaic types, the storyline quests typically follow a two-phase format with sometimes surprising requests that alter your playstyle completely.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2903957765
While the main game takes a rather minimalistic approach in regards to the size and scope of each battle, you'll only be spending about a third of your time solving the chess-like puzzles that make up the main story. Another third will be spent clearing up general-type missions in order to stock up on cards, essences, credits and intel, and perhaps more interestingly the final third will be spent exploring the grounds around your base, fittingly called the Abbey for all its arcane backstories and collectibles. This exploratory part of the game resembles the Krypt mode in Mortal Kombat somewhat, as you will unlock abilities and secrets that allow you to access new areas and gradually uncover the mysteries laid throughout. Words of Power will open up new areas and sidequests will have you returning later in the evening for specific nocturnal triggers.
You can also collect reagents such as plants or mushrooms that you can craft consumables with, and at one point you will have built this sort of ritual where you access daily features in a specific order before advancing the time and launching the next mission. What’s even better, the game’s research / upgrade system encourages you to use the entire roster of heroes on rotation, in order to unlock global bonuses. Gloss functions as a currency for cosmetics: the Hunter’s numerous customizable helmets, tattoos and make-up options, the bedroom upgrades and frames and finally the plethora of paintings you can collect and hang up in frames inside the mansion’s many rooms.
Fans of the X-COM games will be happy to hear that there's a heavy base progression element, rich with crafting options, hero customization and secondary activities, and there's an almost inexorable amount of dialogue featuring any and all characters of the Marvel Universe. Building up your relationships unlocks passive skills, bonuses and eventually allows you to complete challenges to unlock each hero's strongest card and a special Midnight Sun costume.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2903956618
Sadly, however, even if it’s a long haul, I can’t honestly say Midnight Suns has any replayability value. You’ll unlock pretty much everything the game has to show you before the final mission, and unless you’re keen on getting the opposing alignment achievement, you won’t have to do much farming outside of the game’s natural playcycle either. Another minor flaw it has that some general missions have a flawed design, where they have you kill a certain number of enemies but don’t spawn enough enemies and there are minor graphical glitches every now and then, yet nothing major.
The voice acting is also hit and miss, and because of the ocean of dialogue there’s bound to be a lot of filler; I found myself skipping the audio interpretation and just reading the subtitles as quickly as I could on secondary banter towards the end. While there is an incentive to engage characters in secondary dialogue, mostly because of friendship and alignment gains, and a big portion of it is made of interesting takes all of these iconic do-gooders have on anything from literature to old movies, I have to admit there are a number of scenes and exchanges that really feel like filler.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is one of the better games I played this year, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is in the mood for a turn-based ride through a superhero-themed TCG. Know however that while there is 50-100 hours worth of content, depending on your pace, you will most likely not replay this title once you’re done.