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Marvel’s Midnight Suns review: the best Marvel game yetProfessor XCOM
Professor XCOM
For the last ten years, theXCOMdesigners at Firaxis have traded in ‘if’s and ‘maybe’s. If this shot lands, then maybe I can pull off this carefully calculated plan I’m brewing. It’s exactly the kind of taut, knife-edge tension we’ve come to love and expect from their turn-basedstrategy games, butMarvel’s Midnight Sunstakes a different approach. As the titular demon hunters join forces with some famous Avengers faces to take down the evil sorceress Lilith and Marvel mega villain Chthon, there’s never any question about whether your moves will or won’t work here. You’re playing as the world’s most powerful superheroes. Of course, they’re going to work. And forget about cowering behind knee-high cover walls, too, because if you’re not already bulletproof, you’ve certainly got the reflexes and supercharged muscle mass to soak up anything Lilith’s Hydra minions are going to chuck at you.
Card based battles make Marvel’s Midnight Suns an essential tactical RPG | ReviewKatharine also spoke to vid bud Liam about their favourite thing in Marvel’s Midnight Suns.Watch on YouTube
Card based battles make Marvel’s Midnight Suns an essential tactical RPG | Review
The key behind both these things - strategy and the supes - lies in its tightly designed battle arenas. With cover removed from the equation, it paves the way for some brilliantInto The Breach-style puzzle boxes, where crowd control and manipulating enemy positions are the order of the day. You’re handed a set of tools, in this case a deck of cards drawn from the trio of superheroes you bring into battle, as well as a smattering of interactive objects on the map itself, but how you combine them into maximum hurt is very much up to you.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Quick cards, for example, refund your card play if you land a KO with it, while others become stronger if you use one of your limited redraw options on them. Iron Man’s whole deal is built around this idea of hacking the game’s own rulebook to power up his attacks, while former X-Men and current Midnight Sun member Magik can cast free portal cards to corral or knockback enemies to locations of your choosing, making them prime targets for, say, Captain Marvel to land a map-wide photon beam on them, or for Ghost Rider to tear up the map with his flaming Hell Ride. It’s the same kind of unembarrassed power flex that madeGears Tacticsso enjoyable, turning that nervous energy of XCOM’s will-they-won’t-they into a more flashy frolic of strategic endurance.
To further sweeten the deal, battlegrounds themselves are packed with painful opportunities, offering even more of the quick-witted improvisation that feeds its overarching superhero fantasy. The junction boxes you’d crouch behind in a more timid game are now crackling with live wires begging for a goon to be thrown into their open bellies, while lamp posts and cranes wait to be toppled onto enemy heads. Crates, aircon units and piles of wooden pallets can springboard heroes into the air so they can deliver those classic smackdowns from on high, and heck, you can even chuck stacks of Daily Bugle newspapers at their ugly mugs, too. Print is dying, so may as well drag some crims into the grave on its way out.
Through all this special shoutout must go to Firaxis’ art and animation teams for bringing the core superhero fantasy to life. Every attack, special or otherwise, has been gleefully choreographed for maximum smugness, making excellent use of slow-mo, screen shake and sound design to really make it feel like you’re packing a superpowered wallop. It’s clear this is a team that really gets what makes Marvel tick, and nowhere is that more prevalent than when you’re out of battle and hanging out back at your base.
Happily, this isn’t simply a case of light equals good and dark equals bad. While the choices you make impact on the types of cards and abilities Hunter has at her disposal, the same tactics won’t necessarily apply to your superhero colleagues. For example, some actually appreciate you taking a more neutral stance in certain situations, while others take offence if you try to be too goody-two-shoes all the time, both in your everyday conversations and in your post-mission Fire Emblem andPersona-style one-on-one hang outs. (Alas, there’s no romancing to be found in the latter, but there are still fun little hints and digs to be had along the way. Case in point: at one point Blade starts a book club that’s clearly an attempt to impress Captain Marvel, and it’s arguably the cutest darn thing I’ve ever seen in my life.)
It all adds up to give both its heroes and your interactions with them a welcome depth, especially when much of its story sees you playing peacemaker between the squabbling factions of the world famous Avengers and the younger upstarts of the Midnight Suns. Admittedly, there are moments when its team-wide divisions run the risk of derailing the fast and frothy fun of its turn-based battles - I found Midnight Suns’ ringleader Caretaker to be a particularly drab hang - but it rarely tips over into outright frustration. For the most part, Firaxis' writers have a lot of fun with these characters. Their jibes and witty comebacks feel very much of a piece with their MCU counterparts, but crucially, they still feel retain their own distinct set of personalities - a gulf Square Enix’s ill-fatedMarvel’s Avengersgame never quite straddled.
Do they allow you to form the same kind of attachments as your typical XCOM squad? Probably not. They can’t die, for starters, but that’s not to say there’s nothing to hold onto here. For all its daft quips and snipes, Marvel’s Midnight Suns really does go places in its script, tackling deep and sensitive subjects with surprising tact and nuance. I’m far from a Marvel cheerleader - the series lost me when I sat through eight minutes of credits to see Harry Styles and a CG leprechaun - but even I found plenty to get invested in here.
That’s partly because the Abbey is also where you can jump into its broader XCOM-style strategy layer. Just, you know, with a fun Avengers twist. Doctor Strange is your chief researcher, unlocking new upgrades and abilities for everyone, Iron Man uses his technical nouse to crack open new card caches to add to your deck, while Blade runs the Abbey gym, letting you spar with fellow supes for stat and friendship bonuses and combining duplicate cards to make them more powerful. Captain Marvel, meanwhile, runs offscreen Hero Op missions, designed to net you even more rewards that can go back into strengthening your deck. Admittedly, it’s not going to trouble minds that have mastered XCOM’s meta-game layer, but it’s another good way Firaxis marries the popcorn accessibility of the subject matter to the expectations of a chewier genre.
