This game was not on my radar whatsoever, as someone who played XCOM 2 for a few hours and wasn't grabbed by it. I'm a big Marvel fan and the fact that this had Blade, Ghost Rider, Wolverine and other favorites of mine was definitely exciting though. Still, I didn't think I'd ever play this.

I felt intrigued to watch some gameplay eventually when Dave from PlayStation Access had lots of good things to say about it, and suddenly felt very interested by it. I never do this, especially when a game is on sale for only a little less than full price, but I bought it. I barely even buy games I really want to play when they're on sale for half off! I don't know what compelled me to do this, but it was one of the best chance purchases I've done in a long time.

Simply put, I love this game. You get engaging, tactical strategy battles with various ways to take out enemies and make your heroes work together. You get a fun story with rewarding character engagement, great voice acting (IMO) and lots of Marvel references and lore. You get a cool little open world area (keyword: little) and a cozy main hub to explore, find collectibles, resources, and cosmetics. It's all wrapped up in this addicting package that I was hooked to for weeks. I seriously had to pull myself away from this to do chores, get work done, and go to bed. It has a day and night cycle so it has this "one more day", "one more battle" feel. There's always more abilities to upgrade, more missions to do, more hangouts with your heroes to engage in.

The customization for players here is immense, you can choose what abilities, attacks and skills work for you and disregard what you don't like. You can alter hero costumes and what they wear around the main hub area. You can change your difficulty to go harder, or scale back if you're getting your ass kicked; you get higher difficulties as you progress, and it's very risk versus reward. It's a game full of menus, systems and choices that feels daunting, but is introduced in a way that you'll never not understand what you're doing and how you'll navigate it.

The main player character, The Hunter, is a pretty by-the-numbers "chosen one", and both their appearance and their attitude/personality is chosen by the player. There is a standard light/dark path that can be followed, allowing for different abilities, perks and costumes to be unlocked for both. I went light, because I'm not choosing the asshole replies to my hero pals, although to get the Platinum Trophy I started a New Game + file and went full dark. Took me a few hours, I just blasted through story missions, using a ton of dark abilities and of course choose dark for all dialogue options, which I hated! At one point I was a total dick to Captain Marvel and she said "Ouch, Hunter..." with an upset face. My dark Hunter was a prick and I hated that asshole!

I think I'll definitely get the DLC at some point so I can revisit this great game with some new heroes (Storm and Venom I am definitely super interested in).

My unfortunate downsides with this were some glitches; both heroes and enemies fell through the floor a few times, unable to be used or attacked. Also some visual glitches, after using a big screen-filling hero combo sometimes the color of the screen would change to a bright yellow. It would go away eventually, but it was still annoying. The game doesn't look incredible graphically, you'll see people clipping through the environment, walls, and each other, and sometimes there will be a delay or hiccup from characters in battle. I thought the graphics kind of fit with the fun superhero comic-book style of the game though, it didn't have to look super realistic.

All in all, this was a HUGE surprise for me, and I couldn't wait to get back to this game every time I stopped playing. The battles were both fun and challenging, the characters were great to spend time with, and exploring the grounds unlocking items and side quests during a day/night cycle was a nice added touch. It felt very Persona 5 to me (another game I love).

This is a hard one for me to rate.

I like the tactical combat in Midnight Suns quite a bit. It is like a weird hybrid of Slay the Spire and, strangely, Into the Breach, but in 3d with super heroes.
You pick three heroes, impacting which cards will come up in your deck. There is some interesting puzzle-esque gameplay around kill order (certain moves are free if used to kill, certain enemies only have one hitpoint, you have other resources and options at your disposal to change the battlefield, etc...), and each of the heroes has fairly unique gameplay that is enabled by their cards or passive abilities.
As in Into the Breach, each fight takes place on a very small battlefield with reinforcements arriving every round. The number of abilities and cards that move units around also means you are constantly thinking about your positioning, the enemies positioning, and how you can exploit it.
The loop isn't quite as tight as Into the Breach or Slay the Spire, however. Actions can often have somewhat unpredictable results and movement is severely limited, except for every ability automatically moves you, so it is a hard resource to actually manage.
Despite that, it all adds up to an easy to pick up, satisfying little tactical experience with a lot of variety and a lot of flash.

Everything else about the game I really disliked.

Visually, this game is very rough. Character models are weird and low poly, textures take forever to load in and don't look that good, animations are stiff, boring, or just weird, and many of the visual effects don't know if they want to be super realistic or ripped directly from a comic book.

Beyond the tactical gameplay, Midnight Suns cribs from Persona, giving you sort of a day/night cycle you can use to get to know your fellow heroes, spending time with them and giving them gifts to increase their friendship levels for bonuses. This could be a cool idea (but see below about the dialog) if it were a bit more open in its implementation. There are specific, preset groups you join (a book club, a magic club, etc...) whose meetings are at set points over the course of the narrative. You are also given very few opportunities to actually pick who you will focus on (I specifically chose a hangout partner maybe 3-4 times through my entire playthrough). This makes the whole system feel like a pastiche, rather than specific events you are opting into, as in a Persona game.

The narrative in Midnight Suns is, at best, just really boring but usually really juvenile and silly. There isn't much driving things forward beyond a non-specific prophecy and an antagonist with unclear motivations. The characters engage in a lot of CW-style manufactured conflict and drama for reasons that are uninteresting or nonsensical. The game tries to create tension between the old school heroes (The Avengers) and the new school heroes (the Midnight Suns), but it just feels like schoolyard bullshit coming from people who are supposed to be competent adults. The characters are too busy one-upping each other or infighting to ever make me happy any of them are there.
They purposely throw agency and control over the team to the player avatar (why the most famous heroes in the world worship The Hunter is unexplained), but you are never actually given any agency to solve their squabbling or even take meaningful steps to advance your cause. You just end up waiting for the cutscenes that move the plot forward to happen.
The writing is similarly hard to deal with. Every character has one very obvious character trait and everything they say is just about that. Spider-man was bitten by a radioactive spider, Iron Man is a CEO, Ghost Rider has a vengeance demon inside him, etc... If these were small characters without much screentime, it would be fine, but this is hours and hours of dialog that just ends up being repetitive and uninteresting. It honestly feels like comic book writing from before comics writers realized they could make their characters have depth.
Additionally, every single line of dialog is some sort of snarky joke, usually related to that character's one identifiable trait. It is like every single character in every single scene is trying to steal the spotlight with every line they deliver. It makes every interaction trite and annoying in the extreme, especially because of the sheer amount of dialog that exists in the game.

This game has a glimmer of something really fun with the combat and even the basic structure of things, but it is just expressed in the wrong places. If they were less worried about The Hunter and the Midnight Suns, and just let you have fun vignettes with these heroes, solving problems on a smaller scale or in a shorter timeframe things would be more compelling, characters wouldn't be fighting for the spotlight, and the laid-back nature of things in the hub world would make much more sense.
The Deadpool DLC does exactly this and works much better and, if taken by itself, solves most of the problems I have with the game.

In the end, I like the tactical gameplay enough that I didn't completely dislike this game, but if you play it, be prepared to skip literally all of the dialog.

only technical problems i came across was the opening credits being super slow to load in, idk what that's about but even then i still wasn't a fan of this one. i dumped three to four weeks of my life into xcom 2 so i was very interested in this, but this game just doesn't stick the landing. 75% of this game just feels like a waste of time, sorry but i'm just not interested in befriending marvel characters with some of the least funny quippy dialogue i've ever heard (seriously if you thought those forspoken scenes were bad, just you wait). when you're not doing socializing with your 'bros', you're playing a lame as fuck card game.

i've definitely got a bias here cause i do not give a shit about deck building. that being said tho, i also despise turn based combat, but xcom had superb customization, fun mechanics, an interesting story, amazing mod support, and a lot of padding to make it something so much more. i was really hoping firaxis would get me to like card game mechanics the same way they got me to like turn-based combat, but i just wasn't having fun. the thing separating the magic the gathering tournament is this 'hang out the house with your buddies' system that just has no soul in any of it. i wasn't remotely interested in ANY of the characters, all of 'em seemed so two-dimensional. plus the actual context on why those specific marvel characters were doing what they were doing felt lackluster. the only one i'd want to hang out with is blade, who's voiced by black dynamite himself, michael jai white.

they even bring back the photo mode from xcom 2 war of the chosen, but it's actually worse! it gives you the option to make comic covers instead of propaganda posters. i fucking love comics and for the most part, it delivers, but guess what, you can't write your own text. you have to pick from a list of marvel comics code authority approved titles, and they're about as lame as it gets.

long story short, card combat isn't very interesting, and neither is the epic wholesome 100 friendship stuff surrounding it. i'm going back to xcom 2

Si te gusta Marvel este juego es obligatorio jugarlo. Pero voy a hacer un análisis mas profundo.
Empiezo por el apartado técnico.
Técnicamente el juego tiene problemas. Caídas de frames cuando hay mucha acción en pantalla, bugs de iluminación, bugs en personajes, tarda muchísimo en guardar partida... Son cosas que a priori no molestan pero que están ahí.
Gráficamente es precioso y el único fallo que le achaco son las caras inexpresivas de los personajes.
Ahora vamos al gameplay y lo voy a dividir en varias partes del mismo juego. La abadía, el combate y la estrategia.
La abadía: Es el lobby donde pasamos el rato entre misión y misión. Aquí podemos hablar con otros héroes, ir de copas, jugar a videojuegos, ir a un club de lectura y muchas actividades mas. Las relaciones entre héroes son fundamentales ya que nos desbloquean pasivas que nos ayudarán en combate. Dentro de la abadía también tenemos la exploración que nos ayudará a avanzar con nuestro personaje en la historia y desarrollar nuevas habilidades.
El 50% del tiempo lo pasaremos en esta localización.

Combate: El combate es genial y nos permite llevar hasta 3 héroes a la batalla. A medida que vamos haciendo misiones se van desbloqueando dificultades mas altas que suponen un reto enorme sino elegimos a los héroes correctos para cada misión.
[seguiré]

The core gameplay of this game is so strong that I'm giving it 5 stars, even though there are obvious areas for improvement. Going into this, I had heard that the card combat was solid, but that 2/3 of the game was Persona style conversations with your teammates. Superficially, that's true. However, the loop of:

1. Mornings: prep for the upcoming battle - gather new cards, strengthen existing cards, train with one of your teammates.
2. Combat: turn based, deck-building, sublime.
3. Evenings: activities that strengthen the team to help you level up for the next day.

Really worked well for me. To the point where more than once I decided to play "just one more day" even though the time on the clock told me I would regret that decision in the morning.

Sure, the graphics aren't great, there were quite a few bugs (including one that made the Clean Sweep task impossible to finish), some of the DLC achievements won't unlock, the actual Abby grounds tasks felt underdeveloped, the fact that the missions level with you neutered that feeling of progression, there's a lot to improve. But that core gameplay was so fun, that it really overcame the parts that were lacking for me.

Normally I would say that this means it sets up really well for a sequel where the team at Firaxis could expand upon what they did well here and improve on the areas that need help. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that this game did very well so my hopes for that are muted.

There seemed to be a lot of praise for Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope while this one got burried. For my money, Sparks of Hope was fine but wore out its welcome, while Midnight Suns kept growing stronger as it went on.

Idk how to really format my thoughts on midnight suns, I think my brain is a bit mushed rn but I'll try. Basically it boils down to a fun enough card strategy system that's surrounded by bloat.

The characters are all fairly one dimensional, any sort of development most of them get isn't actually development and is just a reference to a comic run they were in. Out of the cast of like 15 or so
heroes, I'd argue at most that 3 get any sort of relevant development, and even then it's mostly just plot relevant rather than character based.

It also has just so much bloated dialogue. I know a lot of reviews talk about how cringe or quippy it is but eventually you can look past that, it's the fact that it takes them 10 sentences to say something they could have said in 2. So often I'd find myself just skipping through the social stuff cause 1) the personalities are nearly all the same or just a rehash of a select few, and 2) it just fucking drags, it's the bulk of the 60 hour playthrough, it's legitimately like 20 in combat, 40 listening to dialogue.

The combat is what holds the game together and seeing it's the xcom team maybe I shouldn't be surprised. While there's little personality to the heroes in their dialogue, their moves and abilities in battle actually do match their skillsets. Spiderman can string together web attacks, Captain Marvel can go Binary for a boost, Blade can bleed enemies to weaken over time etc. It is genuinely quite fun to just do some missions and listen to a podcast in the background.

Overall, it's fine. If you like marvel and strategy games, get this on a discount and just skip through the dialogue. You can pay attention to the plot cutscenes if you want but tbh it's just set pieces strung together, and the ending made no sense to me, maybe I was too focused on a podcast lol.

I usually play just a few contemporary ‘zeitgeist-y’ AAA games a year - when in the weeds with indies, art games, and retro titles, it’s a bit easy to turn one’s back on the chorus of what actually funds the spotlight budget on the medium. As much as, for me, the beating heart of games is the romantic concert of those projects which question the context of interaction within defined systems interrogating thematic concern towards the ideas of choice, ill-portented rationality, gasping deprivation, and other hard to mention excitations of the spirit that can be considered less dangerously in the antiseptic environment of digital reproduction than the cruel world of necessary application, the reality of the games industry is that the actual viscous muscle which pushes through veins ichor are the massive, corrupt, lowest common denominator infatuated blockbuster title games. We can say in all seriousness that the games which matter most are the heartfelt, earnest, no ulterior motive itch.io micro-games about things like desperate backroom abortions, archival practices in the Middle East, or the history of an individual family’s cooking, but the titles which are the most congregated matter/makeup are the games about shooting, looting, and rooting for the US government. I say this with no happiness about the fact, but it is a fact - Nintendo or Bioware may not be the ones who push many, or any, envelopes these days, but they codify where the postage can be sent.

All that said, and that’s usually about the word count that can be dedicated in good faith to thematic discussions of any AAA game’s themes, Firaxis’ Midnight Suns brings enough polish, spectacle, and distillation to ideas that have percolated in the indie scene since their last major release. Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and, I’ll say it, Ladykiller in a Bind, combine with an egregious amount of bloat (which is nonetheless compelling for longer than it has any right to be) to make one of the more exciting and accessible tactics games that has come out in the past few years. While it doesn’t have the depth of any of its influences, and certainly nowhere near the strategic complexity of previous Firaxis games, it does have some truly delightful pageantry that sets it uniquely, expensively, apart from the games it cribs.

Midnight Suns’ truest success comes in a small mechanical dictionary that appends itself to so many of the systems interlocking and rewarding overlapping play; if Into the Breach is the better three member team strategy game, Midnight Suns at least is the more verbose one. The many status effects and terms of ability may seem on their face like a minor part of strategic play, and indeed in other games with statuses like bleed, vulnerable, or frenzied do tend to backseat those effects to turn order and damage numbers. I think that, however, these small appended terms come into the major arm of MS’s strategic play precisely because of their second layer order of application to the major elements of both the base play and the mission play. The ‘set-up’ portion of the game, the interactions between heroes and exploration jaunts throughout the abbey grounds, reward with new collections of potions and item recipes that largely enforce a system interplay between the terms of application that the enemy hordes and your own heroes are tackling each other with. You are assembling your arsenal, as well as building relationships (in an albeit facile and kind of insultingly childlike way), throughout all the downtime periods of a play session, and with the ability to quickly launch a mission and complete it in 5-15 minutes, immediately reaping and bearing witness to the benefits of exploration and narrative play. It’s an integration of non-exclusively mechanical systems with the hard numbers play that Firaxis didn’t really engage with in any of the XCOM games, with an exception to the Chosen DLC for 2 that began a ramp up into what they do here in Midnight Suns.

Of course, the play with the heroes is the draw that makes the above order of mechanics work, and on that front, Firaxis still has excellent heads on their hydra. The different uses and mixes of their roster, including both in how it is made spectacle and how it works on the spreadsheet of the backend, really does nothing short of amaze when considered beside the simple and pandering superhero action of the last two decades that must have been heavy on the designer’s minds. What could have been a pathetic MCU smashup of variously strong people having minorly different HP and damage numbers is instead a varied and widely developed cast that all mix and match with enormous spread and possibility. Nico, Wolverine, Magik, Hulk; all play with each other and on their own in ways that offer totally different tactical assumptions and varying feelings of accomplishment when tackling goals. Say you are on a defeat all enemies mission - a real basic ‘knock-out’ order (whose idea was KOs anyways? as if being shattered into dust after flying through limbo only rendered one unconscious): maybe you take Captain America, Hunter, and Ghost Rider, leaving the battlefield strewn with enemies absolutely beaten to a pulp with massive damage crumblers after turtling up and prepping for turn one; maybe you take Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Magik, gathering all the enemies together with little moving plinks only to take them down with a flood of AoE spells that have been buffed with free play cards and heroic multipliers. Both of these squads ultimately end up doing pretty similar things - dealing damage and buffing - but the progression from deployment to departure by way of the different strengths and weaknesses of team composition legitimately do transcend the vague progression of number climbing that can plague turn-based team tactics.

Of course, as has been said elsewhere, the tactics are the highlight in a lowlight totalised experience. While there is more to agree with in this sentiment than not, and I say this as someone who’s primary access to art remains through novels, poetry, and theatre, I don’t think that the writing which is so criminally derided is pablum. There is definitely far too much of it, and the conversations don’t flow with the tone of the work as it reaches its third act; I wouldn’t say the self-consciousness of the heroes is asinine but it is childish when compared to the confidence that is displayed in the tactics portion of the game. Nevertheless, when considering the source, the dialogue is a worthwhile representative of the source the characters come from. I think so much of what people expect from superheroes is from the poisoned well of cinematic universe storytelling, but Midnight Suns clearly draws far more from the comics, for better or worse, than the movies, if it draws anything from the movies at all. The little hangouts are so Chris Claremont it hurts, and you just know that the plotting is more Walter Simonson or Kurt Busiek than Russo brothers - and over this is a sheen of Bendis that even the Ultimate universe didn’t shine with. Maybe people forgot that superhero stories are soap operas with tights and tanks, but Midnight Suns sure remembers.

The real problem with the game is that which I started with: it's a AAA whale game. There is too much here: between foraging, combat puzzles, making friends, deploying on side missions, researching, crafting, decorating, and petting cats and dogs, the game just has too many tasks over too long a campaign to both remain consistently engaging or competitively challenging. I played on Heroic 2, which I think is basically a very hard or hard mode - it’s 2 degrees above normal difficulty, and I was mowing through every encounter after maxing out the friendships of my heroes, collecting all the mushrooms, and opening all the money/gloss boxes around the grounds. In a less bloated game that had half the runtime, I would have bumped up the difficulty to engage more aggressively with the tactics, but after 40 hours of the same enemies and the same Hydra bombs, the tactics being harder would just be tedious and not engaging. If I’d been barely scraping by on 15 hours, the game could conceivably be called a masterpiece of economy and tension, but like Tony Stark, at the end of the game, the player has accumulated all the capital a small country of super people can generate, capital which can only be used to manipulate hot aliens and vampires into punching their problems away instead of thinking their way through them.

yo this was actually pretty good.

It is nowhere near perfect, but I quite enjoyed my time with it.



Everyone I knew showed next to no interest in this game after they learned it was a card game but I stayed optimistic, and I am honestly glad I did.

They kept calling it "a mobile game" and after playing the game i can confidently say.... yeah I can kinda see why lol.



Let's start with the story though, surprisingly deep, and long.
The story follows your OC teaming up with the Midnight Suns, some avengers, an x-man and Spider-man to defeat the mother of all demons and it, is, awesome. The story goes for a solid 20-ish hours, even longer if you go for all of the side stuff of which there is quite a bit to do, whether it's the surprisingly big hub area or the many challenges you can partake in, it'll be awhile before you run out of things to do.

I will say I found the ending... not so much disappointing, but slightly lacking, like it does kind of just end without much of a bang, but still enjoyable.


The gameplay? y'all ever play Marvel Strike Force? think kind of like that but much better, flashier and more in-depth.

This game really does require some brain power at times. The card system is easy to pick up yet hard to master. it can be punishing yet rewarding. It can also be VERY flashy at times which is awesome.

they do a very good job at making you feel like a super-hero with you being able to just decimate enemies and environments with big attacks.

They also do an incredibly good job with making each character feel unique and useful in their own ways. Every game i wanted to try new characters and combinations to discover new strategies, even towards the end I hated sticking to the same characters because I just wanted to play as all of them. I also loved that I was still unlocking characters like 15 hours into the game, it kept everything constantly updating, giving you new things to try which was very much appreciated. The enemy variety was surprisingly wide as well, and I loved the progression of first meeting an enemy and dreading them to absolutely kicking their shit towards the end of the game.


The mission structure does get kind of repetitive at times, but you get given so many options on what you wanna do next so you're never doing the same mission back to back which helped.



As mentioned, the hub world has a surprising amount of stuff for you to do, with it being the primary way to get cosmetics and certain abilities. Each area having it's own secret little story to uncover which was nice.

There's also friendship stuff you can do with each of the character's like a traditional RPG. You can go on Hangout's and do events with different character's to gain friendships which can get you cosmetics and abilities, and while it is kinda cool befriending all of these iconic characters... why can't I fuck them? Like, I know why I can't because it's marvel. but with this stuff it's usually romances you're building towards, and then sex. Like I want to fuck Nico behind Spider-Man's back and get punished for it. but alas, only friendships, which was inevitable, but disappointing nonetheless.




To be completely honest I don't really have any complaints. Like yeah, the game is long, but I enjoyed that, gave me lots to do. Yeah the missions can get kinda repetitive, but I neevr got bored of the flashy animation style so it kept it entertaining. All the cosmetics looked really cool, the hub was fun to explore, the story and all it's side plots were all entertaining and engaging.


This is honestly just a really solid game that I highly recommend if you love Marvel, especially the supernatural side of it, or if you just love card based strategy games cause this, is really solid.

What an awesome surprise.

The XCOM people made Marvel Emblem Three Houses and it absolutely rules. I went into this game after hearing some good things and I still expected it to be a bit of a slog. Now after 50+ to finish, I'm ready for DLC. Firaxis managed to make something unique, heartfelt, and fun out a property that feels almost worn into the ground by the MCU.

The combat? An interesting spin on "tile" games disguised as a card battler. The hub world? Marvel dating sim without the dating. The customization? Nearly Flawless. Give or take some uncanny valley NPCs and a crash or two along the way, and this was one of my favorite releases of 2022. Big recommend to fans of the genre.

Llevaba años soñando con un juego así, algo que combinase Marvel con la profundidad táctica de juegos como XCOM. Ni en mis mayores sueños podría haberme imaginado ya no solo que fuera a ocurrir, sino que fuera a ocurrir por parte de Firaxis.

La parte táctica es, en resumidas cuentas, redonda. No puedo criticarle absolutamente nada. Cada uno de los personajes tiene su nicho propio, todos funcionan muy bien y son divertidísimos de utilizar. Cada una de las mecánicas se combina para ofrecer un sistema de combate GLORIOSO que no ha dejado de ser divertido en ningún momento de las casi 82 horas que he tardado en terminar el juego.

¡Pero es que encima hay una parte social! Y, si bien es algo más superficial que la parte táctica, está CUIDADÍSIMA. Hay una cantidad francamente abrumadora de texto, de conversaciones, de interacciones y de posibilidades con cada uno de los personajes y en TODAS ELLAS se nota el cariño que le tiene este equipo a estos personajes y a esta franquicia en general.

Quizá la única parte en la que flojea es la técnica. Sin ser un prodigio visual (aunque los combates lucen muy, muy bien), tiene problemas de rendimiento MUY severos en la Abadía, lo cual es un problema porque es donde pasas la mitad del tiempo del juego. Quizá con el tiempo se alivien, pero a 2 de febrero de 2023, esos problemas estaban aún muy presentes y afean un conjunto buenísimo.

He disfrutado como un enano de cada minuto de este juego, ha superado mis expectativas en todos los ámbitos y voy a seguir jugando de forma... prácticamente indefinida. Como mínimo hasta que salgan todos los DLC, pero probablemente más allá.

Uno de mis juegos favoritos de todos los tiempos. Así de claro.

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I spent years dreaming of a game like this, something that combined Marvel with the tactical depth of games like XCOM. Not even in my wildest dreams I could have imagined it was going to become true, and it was going to be made by Firaxis themselves.

The tactical layer is, in just one word, flawless. I can't criticize absolutely anything about it. Each character has their own niche, they all work really well and are so much fun to play as. Each of the gameplay mechanics combines with each other to provide a GLORIOUS combat system that has never stopped being fun in the almost 82 hours it took me to finish the game.

But there's a social layer on top of that! And, sure, it's a bit more shallow than the tactical layer, but it's REALLY WELL DONE. There's a frankly overwhelming amount of text, dialogue, interactions and possibilities with each of the characters and ALL OF THEM are bursting with the love this team has for these characters and this franchise as a whole.

Maybe the only part that's a bit lacking is the technical side. Without being a technical marvel (although battles look really, really good), it has SEVERE performance issues at the Abbey, which is a problem since you spend half of your playtime there. They may be fixed with time, but as of February 2nd 2023, these problems are still very present and they kind of spoil an outstanding whole.

I've enjoyed the hell out of every second of this game, it surpassed my expectations in every way and I'll keep playing for... maybe forever. At the very least until all the DLC is out, but most likely beyond that.

One of my favorite games of all time. Straight up.

Midnight Suns is a fun if unpolished tactics game. It has a lot good about it, like the tactical combat and the writing while not for everyone is straight from the comic books and interesting when it needs to be. By the end I was pretty attached to my little Suns family!

Overall the game is pretty balanced and fun, it really wants you to engage with the mechanics which is great, but a few of the characters (Deadpool especially) feel weak and undertuned. Which leads into my main issue: the game needs patches badly. As of this review, the Deadpool dlc recently came out and while the character is fun he is extremely weak compared to a few other characters. Some more spoilery cast members also suffer from this. Its also quite a glitchy game, I had one crash in my run which isnt awful but I had trophies not pop, the camera glitch out many times, texture bugs and a recurring glitch where the box retrieval mission is incompletable about half the time.

Overall if you like tactical games or marvel comics give it a chance but until some patches come out get it on a sale, i got the game and dlc for $35 and that feels right.

I'm going to revist the game after the final dlc and maybe update this.

A Marvel themed tactical deck builder with persona like social elements is supposed to be a perfect match for me but unfortunately the experience is severely bugged down by weird pacing and bloat.

The game was clearly designed as a live service and while there is no mtx in the final product the design philosophy poisons every aspect of the game.

There are like seven currencies and four different types of loot boxes. Cosmetics are double locked - you randomly get them from loot boxes or activities and then they need to be purchased with another currency.
Some activities require all sort of currencies despite them being limited and unfarmable. - these things don't feel like a balance decision, they feel like things that originally meant to suck actual cash out of players. It's hard to ignore.

The pacing is off, there are a million things going on between battles. It's actually mostly fun stuff like hangouts and club meetings the characters form that all carry small social plots that make the game come alive, it's nice but they stack up and every single conversation in this game goes on for too long.
There's also a whole exploration part that I don't care for but seem to be significant for the other aspects of the game.

I always end a session feeling like I achieved very little compared to the time I've put on.

The gameplay itself is very fun! The tactical elements mesh well with the deck building and ends up being a fairly unique experience. The different characters are very well defined by their cards and most of them are fun to use. The combat has a lot of kick to it.

Letting characters change their clothes and costumes daily is a spark of brilliant design.

The story is kinda basic but the characters are fun (though overly chatty) and even the player's avatar is not a complete cardboard. They actually have enough history and personality traits to help them relate to the cast, it's well thought out.

I like that they chose a rather obscure team and featured minor characters like Magik and Nico, I wish they would go all in and avoid slapping the Avengers on top of them. On the other hand I wouldn't mind seeing an Xmen game in this style.

Just tone it down a little and drop the predatory design.

Take and XCOM and...
- Remove the emergent narrative capabilities.
- Remove permadeath.
- Remove the satisfyingly interlinked visual and mechanical progression.
And add:
- An incredibly cheesy and generic Marvel fixed narrative.
- An MC so uncharismatic it could serve as a template for how not to write custom mcs.
- Real money skins shop.
- A third-person base management and exploration system that is mildly entertaining at best, actively annoying at worst.
- TERRIBLE DIALOGUE
- Passable card-game mechanics.
- Collectathons.
- 2012 graphics.
- 2008 morality system.

Terrible game, very disappointing.

I'm surprised, to a degree difficult to be concise upon. I actually tried to cheese the Steam refund policy with this game; playing the game exclusively offline for the first two weeks, very much expecting it to be so bad I'd need to refund it... and now here I stand quite frustrated that my achievements from those initial unrecorded 10+ hours of gameplay are missing. It is not without fault mind you, buggy textures, wobbly writing, they somehow made Blade more annoying than Captain Marvel, weirdness like that. However, the gameplay is really sublime. I originally felt the card format would be a hinderance towards what I was seeing as the main innovation, the lack of tile movement, but have been proven quite wrong. The game so excellently subdues its RNG to a degree quite unlike the former X-COM devs I know and despise, the game plays like a card game of sorts, with the explosive always just off of OTKs you achieve and the deckbuilding I always appreciate. The difficulty scaling is for the most part, rather fantastic, with my current playthrough having just recently reached max difficulty. It's hard to go so in-depth without this all devolving into a bunch of disjointed points so I'll try to give my overall opinion: "It's a pretty good game that is so distinctly of this era. (writing/game design trends) However, where it trend chases, it feels weak, and I feel that it if it focused on the core of the game, it would be significantly better. However on that however, a part of me feels an over-tuned version of what I like in the game, could very likely make another X-COM2. (A game I'm not fond of, but maybe that could have been a good thing for those who do)