The Abbey portions of the game just aren't for me. I both see and applaud what they're doing, and it's enjoyable, mostly. It's not Three Houses, or Mass Effect, understandably, but it's also not as engaging as 2021's Guardians of the Galaxy was.

Midnight Suns is a by the numbers, linear waypoint following, Dragon Age Inquisition copying, videogame ass videogame. It wants to be such a big game with all it includes. All the systems makes sense and they work well, but starting out it's tutorial boxes and reams of dialogue about said new upgrade from Carol in HR. Don't forget to go see Tony and Stephen to open your new loot boxes...I fast forward and skip almost everything I do in the Abbey.

The combat is incredible. Absolutely incredible. I'm having the time of my life every time. It's simple. It's deep. The card system is great.

so far the gameplay itself is fine but this thing is loaded to the brim with slow, generic filler. for every twenty minutes of gameplay i've had another forty of a bad MCU BioWare game. five hours in and I can count the number of combat encounters on one hand. it's a story heavy game with a very weak story, much more generic Avengers-ish fare than the branding would suggest. not sure if it's worth the effort to break through to where I'm not being handheld with tutorials about how to become friends with iron man

update: i got through to the point where i felt like i was having genuine fun with the combat systems as-intended, but i'm putting it back on the shelf. the game is drowning in fully animated and voiced cutscenes that, even once they improve in quality/decrease in cringe, still feel like too much of a timesink. i like it but i don't think i like it enough to play it for 60-80 hours

A tremendously accessible Xcom-like, for dumb babies like me who always get obliterated in actual Xcom games. There's tonnes of choice in terms of what you upgrade, what characters you use, and what relationships you form - it's a very malleable experience. I found myself pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the story, and how much optional relationship building I did. It's hampered somewhat by extremely MCU-poisoned humour, but the core of the characters is there.

Shelving this for now as, 40 hours deep, I've sort of run out of steam with it and my desire to go back is waning. It doesn't help that the PC version on Steam Deck is still a little wonky, still doesn't remember my graphics settings, and the boot up and general loading times are just slightly too long.

But I will return! This thing is super neat.

Dripping with some of the most potent ‘just one more round’ energy I’ve seen in quite some time.

Found myself grinding in this with little rewards being offered by the game systems… other than the pure joy of finding new tactics to use between ever weirder hero combinations.

Easy to pick up compared to Firaxis’ Xcom titles and yet offers modest challenges in some encounters. You can paint yourself into a corner in one or two battles but never jeopardise your overall game. These become joyful puzzles to solve, not roulette spins of 50/50 shots to take.

Writing is hit and miss but when it gets it right, truly delightful throwback to 90’s Marvel that seems to have been washed away post MCU. Fans of that era well served with their chats amongst the Abbey’s characters, the dlc characters become some of the best.

I finished the main campaign a while ago, but I wanted to wait for all extra content to come out before writing a review – so now that I’m finished with the last(?) DLC mission, it’s finally time.

Without further ado, I can say without a doubt that I haven’t enjoyed a Marvel game this much ever since Marvel’s Spider-Man was released (although Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy came very close). No wonder: Marvel's Midnight Suns combines turn-based tactical role-playing with Marvel characters, and I absolutely love both of those things. Oh, and it’s all sprinkled with dating sim elements (although you can’t actually romance any of the heroes), and a fully customizable, original protagonist that you create yourself. Between battles, you can have long discussions with all your team members, give them gifts, do various activities with them etc., and all these increase your friendship levels with them (if you played any recent Fire Emblem games, you know what I’m talking about). As for the battles, first I found the luck-based card system a bit frustrating, but I got used to it pretty fast, and in the end, I could even turn up the difficulty. It was really fun – however, I totally understand if this type of gameplay doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Unfortunately, the game was plagued with (mostly) minor bugs that are still not patched to this day. Most of them are simply annoying (framerate issues and lagging here and there, UI glitches, extremely long loading and saving times, achievements not unlocking), but I ran into a few game-breaking ones, as well. It’s a shame, because otherwise I have no complaints: the plot, in my opinion, is better than in any more recent MCU movies/shows or comics, the cast is superb (loved how they mixed widely popular, mainstream characters with lesser-known ones), there are many side activities, and even some replay value if you want to check all the outcomes in some situations, or take a different route while choosing between light and darkness. Graphics and music were OK, too, although nothing groundbreaking.

I, for one, find it terribly sad that we probably won’t get a sequel, I would have loved to see more of The Hunter’s story… Pity.

Excellent Combat and boasts much better writing and VA work than I could have ever expected.

Unfortunately it feels a bit bloated and the strategy layer/deckbuilding mechanics leave a fair amount to be desired, but I can't say that the combat was frequently special and almost as enthralling as Firaxis' masterpiece XCOM2

Easy recommend if you are into tactics games.

When this game got first announced I was very disappointed. I love Firaxis and Xcom 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I don't really like Marvel outside of Spider-Man and I was very skeptical of the card based combat. Thankfully I did give it a try because I ended up really liking it. The combat is the star and ended up being really fun and addicting. The cards can be annoying and restrictive at times, but the challenge of working around the system if half the fun. Editing your deck and setting up heroes the way you like it is the my favorite part of the game. Now the story is pretty standard affair. It's fine nothing spectacular but enjoyable. I did like the relationship building system, but I feel like it's a bit bogged down I think they can improve a lot on that in sequel. I look forward to a sequel if there is one because I feel like they can fix some stuff to make it even better.

Absorbente juego de combate por turnos que saca mucho partido al uso de cartas como la fuente de habilidades. Una vez te familiarizas con las mecánicas, es muy gratificante tanto en los combates como en el posterior desarrollo de las habilidades en la mansión. Una vez empiezas a mejorar las cartas y a descubrir otras, invita a experimentar y a aprovechar todo lo nuevo que va apareciendo. Porque, además, los retos que plantean las misiones se van complicando sin llegar a avasallarte. Tiene una progresión muy lograda.

También, si te gustan los tebeos de pijameo, se disfrutan las interacciones entre personajes en la mansión, con sus chorradas (¡Fiesta de cumpleaños sorpresa!), sus movidas (¡Los vengadores no nos quieren porque somos góticos!), sus intimidades (¡spoiler, spoiler, spoiler, Belasco!)... Sí que, llegado cierto punto, el juego se hace largo y he terminado dándole como loco al botón de pasar escena. Yo quería meterme en otra misión no otro diálogo entre superhéroes ya animados "vamos a reventarle la cara a Lilith de una vez".

Ahora he terminado un poco saturado pero si el pase de temporada está de ofertilla en el futuro seguramente vuelva a él.

6 Trophies away from the Platinum, I may get to them when I get the DLC.

I think some of the character interactions are blown out of proportion. Having said that, it definitely is the weak point of the game, as is Hunter, the non-descript protagonist. I couldn't care less about the story and skipped most of the B-tier cutscenes (the ones in engine) but stuck around for the horribly low-res low bitrate cinematics. But towards the end with Chthon (in a truly epic fight) I even skipped the cinematics. The busy work is super busy and with 48 hours clocked, I'll say the day night cycle and the day-to-day system hinders the game. As does some of the unskippable action scenes when you play a card which is cool the first few times and at the end of a turn but some cards take forever. This was my first turn-based-card-based game but I was heavily hooked. The heroes all operate differently and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a fan of the friendship system. It's a bit of a shame that it is essentially window dressing and that there is no real romantic system that you can build with these characters even if they are professing their hyper platonic love for one another. Played on the PS5 in the normal difficulty mode at 1440p 60 fps (although any major damage effects or alpha effects tank the frame rate to the teens and even below as well as the traversal in the small map of the game).

Overall, I would recommend it to any Marvel games fan or anyone who likes this type of games provided with the caveat that they escape every cutscene and focus only on the gameplay.

Despite feeling a bit rough around the edges in terms of performance and UI, I had a lot of fun with this. The tactics gameplay is just the right level of complexity for me to enjoy, more similar to something like Chimera Squad than the main XCOM games. It's got enough options to lead to interesting situations and moments that make you feel smart, but its not so difficult that making one wrong move will ruin an entire mission. I was a little worried about how random card draw would affect the tactics, but with such small decks and plenty of deck-cycling options like targeted redraw, I never ran into a situation where I found myself drawing the "wrong" card and losing a mission due to that.

Character moments are fun and cute, though I did find myself not caring about some of them and feeling like more characters got highlighted in the story while others could have just been left out entirely without much change to the overall plot or team relationships. I will say that not letting us properly romance characters was disappointing. Let me date Magik you cowards.