Marvel’s Midnight Suns is the year’s biggest surprise
Part Firaxis strategy game, part Persona 5, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a modern strategy classic
- Creative director
- Jake Solomon
- Key Credits
- Chad Rocco (Narrative director), Garth DeAngelis (Executive producer)
It’s difficult to remember a game that last subverted our expectations quite as strongly as Marvel’s Midnight Suns. From the first trailer, howls of worry shot out across the Multiverse as players were convinced that the strategy titans at Firaxis were heading down the card game mines, with worries of microtransaction-laced packs of cards flooding the early impression of the game.
But thankfully, after dozens of hours with Marvel’s Midnight Suns we’re happy to report these fears were completely unwarranted. Marvel’s Midnight Sun is a strategy game with cards, but it’s not a card game. More of a tactical RPG that happens to use deck-based combat, that also features a cast of incredible characters and a relationship management game alongside it.
You play as The Hunter, a new, wholly original character created in collaboration with Marvel. Locked away for generations, The Hunter is called into action when The Midnight Suns are faced with the world-ending threat of Lilith, a seemingly unstoppable demon hell-bent on taking over.
The Hunter is a blank canvas for the player, and while the character creator isn’t overwhelming, there are some fun combinations of clothing, hairstyles and skin tones that will make every Hunter unique.
Buy Marvel's Midnight Suns
Marvel's Midnight Suns - Enhanced Edition (Xbox Series X|S)
At the start of a mission, you’ll choose three heroes from the pool of a dozen or so, with some story missions requiring some specific characters come along for the ride. While these story missions usually ensure that some characters aren’t massively over-levelled, if you spend enough time in the general missions as we did with our favourites, you can cause some imbalance in your team.
Each character has a deck of cards, more of which can be acquired via doing missions, or improved versions of said cards can be added to your deck by combining two or more of a certain card. Generally, when you’re presented with a card reward, you can pick two from a selection of four, meaning you’ve got a bit more agency in terms of what you’re working towards and what characters you’re looking to improve.
In the early game, Blade is an essential member of any line-up, as his ability to stack bleed makes even the boss enemies absolutely melt away after a few turns, but the game is balanced in such a way that you can pretty much pick any combination of characters you like and do well, as long as you understand how to synergize your attacks and you’ve upgraded their abilities in The Abbey, the main base for the team that you’ll visit between missions.
Missions largely consist of a number of enemies that need to be defeated in order to progress. However, some missions will also require that a civilian is rescued or something is recovered before a certain number of turns have elapsed. This second style of mission is our favourite as it instantly turns the game into a puzzle, balancing damage output with having enough turns to actually make it across the map to the item/loot/world-destroying bomb that we have to recover.
Missions are split between story missions, which progress the narrative and often feature boss encounters or introduce new members of your team, and general missions, which can be used to gain currency or unlock new cards. The game will occasionally force you to complete a general mission in order to progress the main narrative, but we ended up clearing out most of them anyway because the gameplay hook is just so enjoyable. Starting a mission and drawing five of your best cards in a row is very satisfying.
Some of the missions feel like they last longer than we would have liked, as more and more enemy reinforcements are added to the battlefield. While this isn’t a constant annoyance, there were a few times when it got a bit unmanageable, especially when juggling three of your own characters, and generally only being able to use three cards per turn. However, this annoyance didn’t stop us from staying up far too late on multiple nights in a row, clearing out the harder general missions in order for a chance to make our Blade deck even more unstoppable.
However, the best thing about Marvel’s Midnight Suns is its characters. With a cast as large as the game has, it would be so easy to simply focus on a couple of them and let the others fall into the background, but right from the start, the game gives you a reason to care about all of them, and crucially, encouragement to advance their individual relationship quests.
“The amount of effort put into the writing and performances here elevates Marvel’s Midnight Suns into something really special.”
When the fighting stops, Marvel’s Midnight Suns comes over all Persona 5, with earth’s mightiest heroes sitting around and playing video games while brilliantly written dialogue plays out. These segments emulate those panels in the greatest graphic novels of all time, where you actually get a reason to care about the people behind the spandex.
The Abbey is full-to-bursting with objective indicators every time you finish a mission, letting you know that you have gossip to catch up on, relationships to mend or new mission threads to start.
An easy questline sees your player being asked to help throw a birthday party for Magik, one of the less-sociable members of the crew. In most games, this would be a fetch quest where you find a cake and some candles then call it a day, but in Midnight Suns it feels like every character has something to say about it, whether or not she’d actually enjoy it, and you the game even gives you the chance to spoil it, telling Magik about the surprise early. There are tons of moments like this.
The game would have been great if The Abbey was a generic home base that you’d run around between missions, but the amount of effort put into the writing and performances here elevates Marvel’s Midnight Suns into something really special.
Each of the cast gives a memorable performance that smartly strays away from MCU comparison, (although the game’s Iron Man looks so much like the FX cartoon character Archer that it’s genuinely distracting) and even gets the chance to make its mark on characters that haven’t been touched in modern Marvel games or films.
Nico Minoru, Magik, Blade, and Ghost Rider are highlights. The self-titled “Emo Kids” are the, pardon the pun, emotional core of the game, sick of being in the shadow of The Avengers and ready to prove themselves. We enjoyed these characters so much that we found ourselves almost exclusively having them as part of our team unless forced by the story to include an Avenger, which is a fun piece of role-playing that the game allows.
As for your character, The Hunter can veer towards the dark side or the light, although these options aren’t so seismic that they’ll lock you out of too much content. These changes are mostly the result of dialogue options, which throw up an interesting wrinkle when combined with your personal relationship with each character.
For example, if you respond with only light-sided answers to Magik, she’ll grow cold towards you, despite being a hero herself. It actually makes you read the dialogue and think about how you’re responding rather than slamming the “make me a good guy” button over and over again.
Buy Marvel's Midnight Suns
Marvel's Midnight Suns - Enhanced Edition (Xbox Series X|S)
It’s impossible to say enough good things about the game’s writing. Firaxis, a studio famed for being the master of “one more turn” gameplay, has managed to include dialogue engaging enough that we found ourselves searching out “one more dialogue tree” before heading back out to battle. The grand, overarching story isn’t the strongest, but it’s dwarfed by the number of brilliant smaller, character-driven stories that are all over The Abbey waiting to be found.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a brilliant, absorbing strategy game that elevates itself with incredible writing and a wonderful cast. We genuinely felt spoiled for choice when it came to deciding whether we wanted to spend more time in The Abbey exhausting dialogue choices or head back out to the battlefield for another tough combat puzzle, or to try out a new combination of heroes.
There are niggles here and there, like a few missions that deploy one or two more waves of enemies than feel strictly necessary, but it’s a genuinely challenging experience that offers very little time to rest up. As soon as we thought we’d cracked an overpowered decklist, the game would respond in turn with a new enemy that smashed us to pieces. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is bold, memorable, heartful, and another rock-solid member of Firax’s lineup of earth’s mightiest strategy games.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns combines addictive, deep strategy gameplay with a cast of characters that make the moments outside of the action just as rich and enjoyable as those in it. A lengthy campaign packed with missions to go on and relationships to form with Earth's Mightiest Heroes make Marvel's Midnights Suns a modern strategy classic and one of 2022's biggest surprises.
- Brilliant writing
- Stellar cast of characters
- Huge variation in play-styles
- Long campaign rich with content
- Some occasional mission structure issues
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