When I put out my list of New Year’s Resolutions for games (in addition to Anime), I expected some of these to take a while, even the ones that were joined in progress. What I did not anticipate was getting iced in for a week during Awesome Games Done Quick, so I decided to spend some of that time (since I wasn’t working on work), playing a turn-based game on the side, so I could split my attention – and over a week I ended up plowing through what I had left of Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Now, that was about 8 hours a day for 7 days, or about 56 hours, and I was at Act 2, so I still had a ways to go. However, this does give me some high hopes for meeting my Resolutions for the year.
The plot of Marvel’s Midnight Suns is focused around a handful of new characters. The player controls the new character of The Hunter. The Hunter has been deceased for about 300+ years (since before the American Revolution – making him technically older than Wolverine and Mister Sinister, though not as old as En Sabah Nur), having died defeating his mother, Lilith, who had signed a dark magical contract with Marvel’s other Cthulhu expy, Cthon. However, in the present day, a team of Hydra, lead by Dr. Faustus, revives Lilith. This leads Lilith’s sister, known as “Caretaker”, and her team she mentors – the Midnight Suns (made up of Blade, Nico Minoru, Illyana Rasputin/Magik, and Robbie Reyes/Ghost Rider V), revives the Hunter to fight her. Along the way,?your team will also be joined by some of the Avengers (Steve Rogers/Captain America I, Tony Stark, Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel V). If you get the DLC you’ll also be joined by Deadpool, Eddie Brock\Venom (after a particular point in the story), Storm, and Morbius.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is effectively a mashup of a new X-Com-type tactics game, Fire Emblem Three Houses, and a Deck Builder. Like Fire Emblem Three Houses, you have a base of operations you can wander around with in missions, allowing you to hang out with your teammates and build up rapport which will help you in battle. There are also actions you can do to build up their strength – like training, combining cards to upgrade them, and also generally exploring the grounds to get crafting materials and progress parts of the story. Your explorations will be accompanied by the ghost of Agatha Harkness, who will guide you on your way.
Your characters’ combat toolset is put together by putting together a character “deck” of 10 cards, with three characters per mission giving you a 30-card deck that re-shuffles and cycles. The missions themselves are chosen off of a map in your base (similar to the X-Com world map), where you will select a variety of missions. Some move the story forward, while others will help you grind for resources or just level up your characters.
The combat for those missions is a tactical turn-based combat. Each turn you have a number of card plays, 3 by default, with some cards and abilities giving you and additional play the following turn. With those plays you’ll also be managing your Heroism meter, which goes up to a maximum of 10. Some cards will build up your meter, while others will cost heroism. Additionally, some generic enemies will go down in one hit while others will have a life bar, so you need to manage the number of enemies on the field while taking down the HP of bigger enemies, while also managing mission objectives (defeating certain enemies, protecting certain objects, etc.). This matters because some powers you’ll have in your deck will let you quickly rip through those weaker enemies, and through use of status effects and particular card special abilities will refund your plays (and if you upgrade your cards right, will get card draws that will restock your hand).
Plus, you have a limited number of character moves on the map, allowing team-up attacks (by knocking back enemies into your characters, so they can get an additional hit), shove attacks (knocking enemies into each other, environmental obstacles, or into pits on the map), or setting up environmental attacks – and also getting out of the way of enemy AOEs. It gives the game a lot of strategic depth, arguably more than actual X-Com.
That said, the game has some real awkwardness. Go through enough dialog cutscenes, and you realize that outside of very specific moments, characters only have three standing poses for dialog – fists on hips, arms crossed, and arms hanging loosely. Except for Deadpool and Storm, the core DLC characters play like reskins of other characters from the main game (Morbius uses a mix of mechanics from Blade and Ghost Rider. Venom just re-uses Hulk’s mechanics from when you get him in the late game, for example). It makes getting those characters a little underwhelming (especially Venom, since he’s heavily involved in the game’s first act as an antagonist).
That said, the story for the game itself, along with the DLC, is really fun – the way the relationship between the Hunter, Lilith, and Caretaker is developed works well, and some of the other Marvel villains who are brought in as antagonists are also great. Probably the one gripe with the DLC story is while it involves Vampires in general and Dracula in particular and does have the sense to bring Blade in on the plot, the story also involves Sin – Red Skull’s daughter – and doesn’t bring in Cap.
Ultimately, I had a lot of fun beating the game, and came away rather bummed that the game fared so poorly, meaning that Firaxis won’t be able to do a sequel – the characters we see here are very well realized, and I’d have loved to have seen a follow-up game, possibly with a focus on the X-Men in the Krakoan era.
In the event you do want to pick it up, the game is available to purchase from Amazon or the Humble Store. Buying anything through those links helps to support the site.
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