As a massive fan of the rebooted XCOM games, you’d think I would have bought Midnight Suns as soon as it was released. But, mainly due to its deck-building elements, I was hesitant. I eventually acquired it last year, and now, as part of my Year of Gaming, I finally got round to playing it.
So, what’s it like? Was I right to be cautious?
Reminder: For the Year of Gaming Challenge, I have to play a game I’ve never played before (one of the many games I’ve bought in Steam sales and never got around to playing), give it a fair chance and write up my thoughts by the end of each month. (That may not sound like much of a challenge, but as a father with a lot going on right now, it will be hard to fit it in!)
I’ve clocked up nearly 800 hours in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 (not to mention hundreds more hours across several Civilisation games). So, when Firaxis announced they were making a Marvel game, it should have been a no-brainer. But I’d heard mixed things from the original reviews, plus, I have a thing about deck-building games… If I wanted to play a card game, I’d play one in real life. Card-based systems in video games just never seem to click with me.
Well, this was a chance for one of my favourite studios to prove me wrong!
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
Midnight Suns is a turn-based tactics and role-playing game, developed by Firaxis and released in 2022. You play as a legendary hero who has been resurrected to battle an evil demon by assembling a Scooby gang of characters from across the Marvel Universe, including the X-Men, Avengers and Spider-Man.
The Midnight Suns Logo above a lineup of characters. From left to right: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Hunter, Blade, Scarlet Witch and Night Rider.
Story/Writing
A demon called Lilith has returned from the grave and teamed up with Hydra and a parade of colourful bad guys, including Crossbones and Venom. To fight this new threat, The Hunter is resurrected. Hunter is Lilith’s child and the one who defeated her centuries ago. Hunter becomes the leader of the Midnight Suns, a group that now includes heroes like Dr Strange, Iron Man and Blade, along with some minor X-Men characters too obscure to even cameo in the first Deadpool movie. You can customise the Hunter, choosing their gender and appearance, and must then lead the Midnight Suns to stop Lilith and Hydra, before they… OK, I’ve only completed the first act, and I’m not sure where the story is going. There’s a prophecy, something about a Midnight Sun (singular)… probably Mephisto or Cthon will show up, and there’ll be a blue skybeam at some point… Look, she’s a demon working with Nazi’s, so I’ve got to assume it’s something BAD!
So far, the story has been fairly compelling. Like in XCOM, it feels like you’re always on the back foot, even if some of the fights are relatively easy. It’s a suitably world-ending threat to bring these characters together, with twists and turns that I won’t spoil, and the writing is generally pretty good. There are a lot of quips, and they don’t all land, but they’re not as unbearable and cringeworthy as they could be – high praise for a Marvel game! (Plus, there’s an option to reduce the frequency of quips during combat, which all Marvel games should have!)
The bit that I suspect will be the Marmite in this tactical combat/RPG sandwich is The Abbey. The game has a daily cycle, where you wake up, train and level up your teammates, then go out on a mission, before returning to hang out at night. It’s a nice little loop, and there’s only a certain number of activities you can do each day, which means you have to prioritise and sometimes make difficult decisions. I like it, but it depends how much ick you get from the whole “I created an original character, who gets to hang out with the X-Men and go for picnics with Captain America” thing. It can definitely be cheesy. And the tone is all over the place, with fate-of-the-world melodrama one minute and characters quipping and squabbling like children a few seconds later… but hey, that’s basically the formula for MCU dialogue at this point!
I do like that it’s not always obvious what the ‘right’ answer is. I was trying to play as a light-side good-guy (oh, there’s a morality system, because of course there is!), but the light options can sometimes negatively affect your relationship with certain characters. So you have to choose whether you keep pushing towards the light, which presumably grants some bonuses, or to prioritise your friendship with the characters, which can unlock new outfits and abilities for that character and the rest of the team. Even with characters I was more familiar with, like Captain Marvel, I would sometimes make a choice that didn’t work out as I thought it would.
Craft
I’ve played a lot of Firaxis games, and (particularly while playing XCOM), I often wondered if they even have a QA department! I love them, but they are buggy and janky as hell. Part of me wondered if they could deliver a high-quality, high-budget game worthy of having the Marvel logo slapped on it. But they’ve really impressed me.
The graphics during combat are a huge step up from XCOM. There are fewer characters on screen, but they are larger and more detailed. And the hero animations are perfect, brimming with personality; Spider-Man swings across the arena, while Dr Strange levitates serenely.
That’s not to say it’s without jank. There’s the classic XCOM problem of soldiers failing to point their guns in the right direction, and there’s often a lengthy pause between issuing an order and it being followed, as the character works out how to move across a relatively simple arena. There also seem to be unusually long loading times, given that I’m running it from an SSD, conversations occasionally get skipped without any input… But overall, I was impressed by how well it all works, most of the time.
The bit that really surprised me was the Abbey. It’s not just a small building where you go to hang out between missions. There are extensive grounds to explore with secrets, puzzles and mysteries to solve. It’s beautiful too, at all times of the day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an RPG to rival the likes of Mass Effect, but given that it’s Firaxis’ first attempt at something like this, it’s pretty damn good.
Gameplay
As predicted, the deck-building element is the weakest part of the game, for me. Each character has a hand of ability cards they can take into battle. Each turn, cards are drawn at random. Some generate ‘Heroism’, others spend it. You can also throw items, knock enemies into electrical boxes and drop lamp posts on them. It works well, and it’s mostly fun, but I think I would have preferred to simply choose which abilities and items to take into battle, with cooldowns and powerups, rather than relying on the randomness of drawing cards. You can redraw cards, and, to be fair, most of the abilities are useful, but still. I think there’s enough variety in the situations and your teammates that it wouldn’t get stale if you took the randomness away.
One disappointment was that boss characters like Crossbones and Venom can interrupt missions at random. That’s not the disappointing bit; it adds a bit of ‘War of the Chosen’ spice to the game. But a boss is just a regular enemy with more health that you have to KO multiple times. I just wish they were a bit more mechanically interesting. You also mostly seem to fight the same parade of Hydra goons, at least in the first portion of the game (unless you have the DLC, which unlocks a new enemy faction).
Which is not to say that they don’t spice it up. Occasionally, you will have to destroy or defend an object, focus on a particular enemy, interrupt a dark ritual or build up Heroism to finish off the boss. The heroes feel suitably different as well. I particularly like Nico’s abilities, which are random and unpredictable. There are also loads of buffs and power-ups to be deployed, some of which have tradeoffs, like making you deal more damage but making you more susceptible to damage. You can see how DNA from XCOM has infiltrated the game.
There’s a surprisingly deep amount of customisation too, and I enjoyed making Hunter my own. Though I would have liked more options to customise things like masks and headpieces with a broader array of colours. I basically didn’t use them because I couldn’t get them to match my outfit!
All in all, it’s a compelling loop of activities, and I enjoyed pretty much all of it.
The Stats
- I got the game free on the Epic store. It’s £49.99 full price, currently reduced to £7.49. Once I knew I was enjoying it, I paid £9.99 for the Season Pass (normally £39.99) to get the four DLC characters too.
- I have played it for around 35 hours and passed the end of Act 1. But I wasn’t rushing, I spent a lot of time exploring the grounds and doing optional missions to level up my team.
- I fully intend to keep playing it after this blog goes out, as I feel like I’m less than halfway through the story, and I’m sure there is more to see, even if I have already found most of the Abbey’s secrets.
Final Thoughts
I’ve enjoyed Midnight Suns a lot more than I thought I would. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the whole package and will continue to play it alongside whatever I choose to try next month. The turn-based tactical battles are great, the deck-building aspect is less annoying than expected, and the interactions with the team, the Abbey grounds and the RPG elements in general are a lot deeper than I expected.
I wouldn’t pay the full £90 for the Legendary Edition, but I’d definitely get it if it were on sale for under £40, as it currently is! I can understand why elements of the game would turn some people off, but my initial instinct was right: this game feels like it was made for me!
For more, check out my other Year of Gaming 2025 reviews,
as well as my other Game-related posts.