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--

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1 day

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January 31, 2023

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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.