PREVIEW: Marvel’s Midnight Suns has totally subverted our expectations – Video Games Chronicle
When we were asked to head over to Firaxis’ office in Baltimore Maryland for the reintroduction of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, we weren’t sure what to expect.
When the game was first revealed last year, the reaction was incredibly mixed online. Some complained the game wasn’t X-COM 3, and some thought it was an action game, but the biggest issue seemed to stem from one thing: Cards.
Cards have an incredibly bad reputation in modern video games. They seem to be forever linked to microtransactions, or random loot-box packs. Randomness. Extra spending. Pay-to-win. So with all of that baggage in the back of our mind, we sat down for a presentation from the game’s creative team, the minds behind X-Com, and within five minutes our fears were assuaged.
The game has cards, but it’s not a card game. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a tactical RPG that uses a deck-building-style combat system. At the start of each mission, you’ll choose three heroes to enter the battlefield, each with a large number of abilities, that are represented by cards. During each turn of play in a mission, you can typically use three cards, redraw two of them, and move your character once. Think of it like Slay The Spire with X-Com’s positional-based movement mechanics.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns Spider-Man mission gameplay
Certain characters specialise in different abilities such as Blade being able to add passive damage to characters via bleeding or Spider-Man holding enemies in place. You can choose any three from a long list of Marvel characters once you unlock them, all of which have a long list of classic costumes, and some new ones designed specifically for Midnight Suns.
We found the missions to be challenging, but rewarding. One mission saw us face several goons, the task being to destroy a helicopter in only a few turns, while stopping the enemies. We had to replay it a good few times, as the game became a bit of a puzzle.
Managing how many moves we could make across the field, how much damage the helicopter had to take, and mitigating the health that was pouring out of us as we did it. It was satisfying to solve, and we hope the game is full of missions like that, in addition to the more linear story ones.
You play as The Hunter, a new character created in collaboration with Marvel that has been locked away for hundreds of years. When a demonic threat targets earth and begins possessing some of the Marvel universe’s biggest bad guys, it’s up to The Hunter and The Midnight Suns to take Lillith down once and for all.
The Midnight Suns are a rag-tag group of heroes from across the Marvel Universe. They’re the Sex Pistols to The Avengers‘ Beatles. Made up of Blade, Ghost Rider, Nico Minoru and Magik, …….
