Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review: Superhero Strategy That Deals Players a Good Hand

There are many reasons why Marvel’s Midnight Suns is more than just a Marvel-themed reskin of Firaxis’s XCOM series, but the most important one is that the game’s tactical combat is brilliant. Each hyper-fluid battle comes across as a mash-up of card-battlers, chess, and—somehow—pool, as your supergroup of Avengers, X-Men, and Runaways send enemies caroming across the map into one another, always setting up the next big shot.

That alone justifies all the interstitial team-building moments back at your home base. But it’s worth noting that even the most seemingly cheesy or cringe moments—like joining the book club Blade set up to get closer to his crush Captain Marvel—wind up paying dividends, and not just in the essential passives that you learn by boosting your friendship with each ally.

Midnight Suns is at its best when focusing on newer heroes like Nico Minoru and Magik whose stories haven’t been told a dozen times over (no offense, Tony Stark) and for the most part don’t beg any comparisons. But the gameplay freshens up each hero by giving them unique approaches to the card-based combat, with Robbie Reyes’s Ghost Rider dealing himself damage in order to heavily damage foes, Spiderman being more effective at making environmental attacks, and Captain Marvel needing to be given enough time to charge up and go Binary.

Throughout the game, Multiple heroes can fulfill the same type of role, such as Wolverine and Captain America, who are both tanks. But they go about taunting foes and subsequently surviving the assaults in very different ways, with Wolverine using lifesteal and a healing factor and Captain America building up his block (a secondary health bar) by damaging foes.

Midnight Suns also benefits from already having learned the mistakes of the past, mainly the 1992 Midnight Sons comic books on which the plot is very loosely based. The game’s villain, Lilith, has a direct connection to your customizable Hunter character—she’s their mother—and among her thralls are instantly recognizable Fallen versions of heroes and villains like Venom and the Scarlet Witch. This keeps the mystical mumbo-jumbo focused on the personal, which is particularly helpful during the weak middle third of Midnight Suns.

The game’s streamlined, focused combat also plays the hero. Indeed, even when Midnight Suns pads its length by forcing players to complete “general” missions between most story maps, the joy of finding new synergies between heroes and testing out newly acquired, upgraded, or modded abilities keeps these levels from feeling like grinds, even in the 50-hour mark.

That’s not to say that the non-action-y parts of the game lack polish or attention to detail. Between missions, players convalesce at The Abbey, and in addition to upgrading various facilities—by fulfilling specific character requests—you can wander the mystical grounds, gradually coming to understand what happened between Lilith and her sister, the team’s Caretaker, and Agatha Harkness and her protégée, Wanda Maximoff. This is Midnight Suns’s way of allowing players to get as much (or as little) story as they want out of the campaign, and it’s a credit to their design that these largely optional tasks aren’t just an idle distraction. At worst, they’re too much of a good thing, with players torn between seeing how this mystical apocalypse will next unfold and coming to better understand Lilith’s motivations.

Midnight Suns’s biggest payoff comes in its final mission, which ties together all of your efforts at The Abbey and in previous combats. Forcing players to utilize their least played characters is particularly telling of the game’s design philosophy, for the success of your multipart battle proves that Midnight Suns is only as strong as its weakest links—and, consequently, so long as you’ve been paying attention, there are no weak links when it comes to the game’s combat.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Finn Partners.