HomeFeaturesMarvel’s Midnight Suns
How Marvel’s Midnight Suns lost the race with the MCU, but came out all the better for itWe go hands on with the first 4 hours of Firaxis' new tactics RPG
We go hands on with the first 4 hours of Firaxis' new tactics RPG
Chance has always been an integral part of Firaxis’ turn-based tactics games. Just ask the many thousands of players who missed a shot with a 90% success chance in one of theirXCOMreboots.Marvel’s Midnight Suns, however, could be the Civilization studio’s biggest gamble yet. Not only is it their first game to mix substantial RPG elements into its tactical combat, but there’s nary a hit percentage in sight. In the four hours I spent playing the opening of Midnight Suns last week, I saw precisely one scenario that had any kind of per cent number attached to it – and that was booting a goon (100%) or Venom, one of the newly confirmed villains of the game (0%), off a rooftop. All your other attacks, represented here as a deck of cards, are guaranteed hits.
It’s a strategic evolution I’ll talk about in a second, but this switch-up in approach isn’t the only part of Midnight Suns story that’s been subject to the whims of (mis)fortune. No sooner had Firaxis announced the game itwas delayedin the snap of Thanos' fingers (from March to the second half of 2022, nowconfirmed as October 7that tonight’s Summer Game Fest). But speaking to creative director Jake Solomon, the extra polishing time they set aside gave them an unexpected benefit. And it’s all down to afishwitch called Wanda.
Hands On - Marvel’s Midnight Suns Is Shaping Up To Be A Super Powered Tactical RPG | PC GameplayWatch on YouTube
Hands On - Marvel’s Midnight Suns Is Shaping Up To Be A Super Powered Tactical RPG | PC Gameplay
While the game’s name is a reference to Solomon’s favourite 90s Marvel comic - Midnight Sons: Spirits Of Vengeance – he tells me that “Wanda’s story is the story of Midnight Suns.” If you’re not ITK about the MCU, Wanda Maximoff, aka: the Scarlet Witch, has become a key player, both in last year’s WandaVision miniseries and this year’s Dr Strange movie The Multiverse Of Madness. Without veering into spoiler territory, the last 12 months haven’t just put Wanda on the MCU map, but also introduced orbiting parts of Scarlet Witch lore, including Agatha Harkness and all-consuming book of evil the Darkhold – both of which feature heavily in Midnight Suns. Now, we all know Marvel has a bad habit of making films that are more or less pure setup for the next MCU instalment, but Solomon assures me this wasn’t at all planned in the slightest.
In this version of the Marvelverse, Scarlet Witch has become Doctor Strange’s apprentice. Lilith, however, has other plans for her.
Solomon, a Marvel fan way before he was put in charge of designing and eventually directing Firaxis’ XCOM games, certainly seems to have taken it all in his stride. He tells me he did ask Marvel’s games division “in a joking way” whether this was all some grand, Fiege-ian level plot (after all, it’s not entirely unheard of for Marvel tochange their running orderorcut entire charactersout of one film only to stick them in another), but, “They’re like, ‘No! We don’t talk to Marvel Studios, we’re Marvel Games’,” Solomon tells me. Ultimately, he puts it down to “just good stories interconnecting,” although not without adding that he and his team will have to “go super, super deep for our next game” if they’re going to avoid a similar situation in the future. Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2 confirmed? We’ll have to wait and see.
You can choose to explore the Abbey grounds any time between missions, but you’ll have to expand and upgrade the Abbey’s facilities, as well as unlock magical incantations known as Words Of Power, in order to push deeper into its tangle of thorns and overgrown thickets. It’s part Metroid, part XCOM in this respect, but Firaxis haven’t just stopped there. There are also mushrooms and plants to gather for a spot of crafting (although for what I never got to see during my play session), as well as special hang-out spots for when you want some extra downtime with various members of your newfound super squad.
The look and design of other Marvel heroes takes inspiration from the Marvel comics of the 80s and 90s, so it only seems right to follow suit with big 80s ‘Volume’ hair.
That’s right. You’re no longer a pair of eyes in the sky in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. You play as your own customisable superhero calledThe Hunter, a unique character Firaxis created in collaboration with Marvel. Despite the female-heavy promo art, there’s no canonical gender for The Hunter, giving you free rein to create whatever kind of hero you like, starting with their “body type” (gender isn’t even mentioned in the menu screens) before moving on to pick various different hair styles, skin tones, face shapes and facial hair - although when you’ve got the option of big 80s ‘volume’ hair (as you can see from my screenshots), there really is only one viable choice.
Duplicate cards can be combined into stronger ones in Blade’s training yard.Tony Stark will analyse gamma coils you retrieve to unlock new cards for your deck.
Duplicate cards can be combined into stronger ones in Blade’s training yard.
Tony Stark will analyse gamma coils you retrieve to unlock new cards for your deck.
You’ll need to be a little bit careful, though, as the way you role play The Hunter will also affect their relationship with other Midnight supes. While some heroes respond positively to darker tendencies, others recoil, decreasing your friendship level with a sad, -1 heart icon. This is what excites me most about Midnight Suns. There’s no Fire Emblem-style romance, alas (that wouldn’t be canon, says Solomon), but it borrows from a similar playbook. Every hero has likes and dislikes to discover, and you can choose to ‘hang out’ with one of them at the end of each day to give your friendship level a hearty boost in the warm vibes department. It’s very Persona, which, alongside Fire Emblem, Solomon cites as “games that I played the shit out of, for that reason.”
“I think there are a lot of Japanese developers who do this really well, who combine tactics with RPG, specifically relationships,” he says. “Once it gets into, like, being able to worry about these characters on the battlefield and then, in a more light-hearted way, worry about them off of the battlefield, I think it’s just, I don’t know, it’s just there’s like resonance there where it just makes you care even more and more about the characters. So yeah, I love it.”
Each hero has a deck of eight cards they can bring into battle with them, and you can customise them at any time when you’re in the Abbey.
Creating an RPG like this for the first time didn’t come easily, however. Solomon admits the team did “a lot of stumbling” and made “a lot of bad decisions” before they came out the other side, but from where I’m sitting the end result is shaping up to be just as compelling as Nintendo’s finest. At this early stage, there’s no way of telling just how frosty a relationship can turn – and whether characters will act out or proffer different dialogue when you try to engage with them, for instance – but Solomon did speak at length about what the benefits are of becoming best pals with them. Like Fire Emblem, everything feeds back into the combat system, unlocking better cards for the heroes in question and, most importantly, more powerful Heroic combo attacks.
Having waves of enemies does come as a surprise. Instead of all goons appearing onscreen at the start of battle, a handful of back-up bods keep flooding the compact battle arenas at the end of each turn until everyone’s felled at the same time. Compared to XCOM, battles are much more about effective crowd control than picking off troublesome loners, which perhaps sounds tedious on paper, but it feels pretty rad under the thumbs. The best comparison I can give is probablyInto The Breach, just with superheroes instead of giant mech suits.
These environmental attacks can only be used once per turn, but slotting all these puzzles piece together is just as stimulating for your little grey cells as it is watching the action playout in front of you. I instantly become hooked on Quick attacks, for example, which refill the number of cards you’re able to play if you KO an enemy – and when some henchmen are so weak they don’t even have a health bar to their name, you can end up doing quite a number on them in a single turn.
That’s not to say Marvel’s Midnight Suns is easy. While you definitely ride the power curve with greater confidence than you did in XCOM, there are plenty of tougher Hydra soldiers to take care of that will require multiple turns to take down, which become especially problematic when you’ve also got one of Lilith’s Fallen villains to deal with at the same time. Indeed, in a particularly nice twist (and perhaps a nod toXCOM: Chimera Squad), battles will often roll from one to the other, capturing a similar sense of scale and pace as the kind of city-spanning smackdowns seen in the films.
Each superhero has their own favourite activity and likes and dislikes to discover.
For all its energetic pep, there are a few lingering concerns. Compared to the wonderfully fluid battle animations, for example, your super crew feel less characterful when they get back to base. Conversations, while well-written and brilliantly voiced, often play out very static and still, the fixed poses and slow camera pans calling to mind the slightly jarring encounters of Mass Effect andHorizon Zero Dawnrather than, say, the livelyBaldur’s Gate 3. Traversing the Abbey grounds could also really do with a jump button, as the tight, over the shoulder camera angle can sometimes make it hard to see where the main paths are, making for a very inelegant-feeling Hunter who’s constantly crashing into invisible boundaries. You can tell its Firaxis’ first RPG, in other words, although given the depth of its design on show here, as well as how deeply it all ties back into its wider battle system, I have a feeling it’s something a lot of people will end up forgiving when they actually get their hands on it.
I certainly feel like I’m in that camp at the moment. Sure, it’s a little bit wonky in places, but this is hands down the most thrilling and engaging Marvel game I’ve ever played, and arguably the kind of Marvel game that Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics’ actualAvengersgame should have been all along. There’s so much to dig into here - even after four straight hours with it I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface - but I’m excited to begin again come October time and see exactly what kind of hand Solomon and his team have been waiting to deal us ever since Midnight Suns was first unveiled at the end of last year. There’s still a chance it could succumb to the same curse as other Marvel games, of course, but if I had to put all my cards on the table, I reckon this might finally be the one to come up trumps.
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