Midnight Suns Review After 100 Hours Played

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review: In this Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review we’ll be taking a look at the new turn-based RPG developed by Firaxis (makers of X-COM), and published by 2K Games. Fans want to know: How is the story? How is the character customization? And does the deck building system work or is it a downgrade from X-COM? In this review we’ll answer all those questions and more.

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Midnight Suns Review After 100 Hours Played

Midnight Suns Story & Setting

In Marvel’s Midnight Suns you take on the role of the Hunter, who has been brought back to life to face Lilith (mother of demons), and stop her from unleashing her demonic forces upon the planet a second time. The fact that she’s your mother as well makes things all the more complicated, and there is a large focus on this aspect of the story. Will you help the Midnight Suns stop her? Or will you be swayed by your affections for her and help to usher in a new era for mankind?

The Marvel universe is certainly an interesting setting for a turn-based RPG, and any game featuring this many Marvel characters gets an immediate abundance of background and lore that helps create a complex yet cohesive world. This should have meant the developer had an easy time creating a storyline and polishing it, however I was left disappointed by the story overall. While the characters themselves are for the most part interesting, and I found the continuous stream of cheeky one-liners endearing, their use and interactions as presented by Firaxis certainly left a lot to be desired.

Not only is the plot about as generic as it comes in terms of Lilith’s motivations and the series of events that subsequently unfold, but you spend a lot of time (and I mean a LOT) just doing mundane activities with the Midnight Suns and Avengers, like playing X-Box or swimming in the pool. I mean Book Club with Blade is great and all, but isn’t exactly how I want to spend my free time! A weak storyline with generic plot triggers fails to truly immerse you into the universe, making the extra activities feel like a chore.

And while you do get some insight into the back story of many of these characters via these interactions, which Marvel fans are sure to appreciate, the sheer quantity of “background exposition” points made me dread just about every interaction with them (outside of the main plot). At some point I just started skipping them, so I could get back to the best part of Midnight Suns, the combat.

Midnight Suns – Gameplay

The gameplay loop of Marvel’s Midnight Suns has you going on Missions to defeat Hydra, gaining XP, currency and new cards that you can add to your Hero Decks, and then heading back to the Abbey (the Midnight Suns’ “home base”) where you will “hang out” with the Midnight Suns and Avengers. Here you will improve your relationships with them via dialogue, which subsequently improves their performance in combat, as well as upgrade the Abbey and tweak your Hero Decks to make them better based on the new cards you’ve acquired.

Midnight Suns Review – Combat & Deck System

The combat in Marvel’s Midnight Suns uses a deck system where each hero you bring along has 8 cards they can play (with some restrictions), and each turn you will draw from a pool of all 3 heros’ decks you bring along. This gives you a somewhat random assortment of abilities to use each round, though you can increase your odds of drawing the cards you need by building your decks in certain fashions, not unlike Magic the Gathering. This means your performance on the battlefield isn’t just the cards you draw, but the preparations you made to your decks outside of combat, in addition to the composition of heroes you bring along.

In my opinion, it’s this dynamic that is the star of the show when it comes to Midnight Suns, and the removal of RNG from the attacks themselves is a direct upgrade over X-COM. You do not need to save scum in Midnight Suns hardly EVER, which was simply not the case in X-COM (I’m looking at you 95% hit chance).

Not only has Firaxis made a combat system in Midnight Suns that is more compelling than X-COM, but it is also more varied along the way since you have essentially 13 different unit types in the 13 different heroes, compared to the 4 in X-COM. And this doesn’t factor in the combinations of those 13 heroes which can really change the way each mission is played out.

In short, Marvel’s Midnight Suns might have the best turn-based combat I’ve ever played in recent memory, and that says a lot in my opinion. I simply could not stop playing the game because of this one aspect alone, and it often made up for all the other issues Midnight Suns had, of which there are a lot.

However, combat isn’t everything, and perhaps the single biggest complaint I have in all of Midnight Suns is that the enemy and mission variety are extremely repetitive. You do roughly the same 5 mission types the entire game, and even the main missions fall into one of these 5 categories, as if Firaxis couldn’t be bothered to craft something unique for them.

On top of that, though there are more enemy types than what I had seen in our early impressions video, there aren’t many more, and the most interesting enemies (the Super Villains) play a small role in the grand scheme of things. It feels like so much effort was placed on the other aspects of gameplay in order to capitalize on the Marvel brand, that this portion was just completely overlooked, which is a real shame.

Midnight Suns Review – Gameplay Outside of Combat

Outside of combat you will tinker with your Hero Decks, upgrade the Abbey which improves various aspects of the gameplay loop, and of course spend time exploring the Abbey grounds and speaking with the other super heroes that come along and help you. Aside from the Hero Decks, which I really liked working with and gives a solid amount of entertainment time, but is essentially an extension of combat, the rest of Midnight Suns’ gameplay is sadly underwhelming.

The interactions at the home base reach the tedium point soon after the “newness” wears off, and you start to realize that the dialogues are nearly endless, when you’ll begin to skip them whenever you see them just to get back to the combat and deck building. I cannot see anyone, and I mean anyone but the diehard Marvel fans sticking it out and listening to ALL of the dialogue in this game. There is simply too much, and it isn’t high enough quality to justify it. This is coming from someone who has played games like Pillars of Eternity and didn’t complain about the endless text: this is because it was optional so I didn’t have to do it to upgrade my heroes, and it was much better written and about interesting topics.

Audio, Visual and Design

On the visual front, Midnight Suns is not a gorgeous looking game, nor is it a bad looking game, and it falls somewhere in the middle. The footage you are seeing is not on the highest graphics of the game, since I struggled with performance when trying to play the game on higher settings, even though my machine should more than handle it. I do however really love the animations of the game in combat, and each hero has somewhere around 15 or so abilities that have all been fantastically animated, really adding to the “feel” of the game. Super heroes would have badass effects after all, and Midnight Suns delivers in spades in this regard.

Audio wise, the voice acting is not S tier, but for the most part I enjoyed it, though I did feel the writing let down many of the game’s characters in a variety ways. A salient point is that the main character’s voice acting was really bad, and felt extremely out of place. I understand that you’re supposed to be hundreds of years old, but the delivery just sounded robotic, and I can’t help but feel the game would actually be better without this character in general, since its only purpose seems to be a way to give you character creation, which ended up very bare bones.

The music was not very memorable, but it did have its moments. The star of the audio track are the sound effects which were absolutely stellar, and attacks looked and felt amazing partly because of this aspect. When you fire a million rockets all over the screen with Iron Man, you expect it to sound explosive, and it definitely does.

There were a few bugs in the game, nothing really major, and besides the performance being rough at 4k, I had really no other issues while playing Midnight Suns. Since I played on PC, I don’t know how this will perform on consoles, but I speculate older platforms like PS4 and Xbox One may have trouble with it, particularly the load times which were a tad long even on an SSD, but not much.

Midnight Suns Review – Replayability and Pricepoint

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is not stingy when it comes to replayability. Not only are there infinite side missions to do, but the game adds a new type once you’ve finished the main story line, and there are about a dozen difficulty levels for those who want a serious challenge. I’ve clocked over 100 hours in Midnight Suns, and of that time about 25-30 of it was spent on the main story line, and the rest on mostly optional content, simply because I was having fun.

And while I’m not sure how much more I’m likely to play after this point because the End Game is essentially the same as the rest of the game, simply with more rewards, if I had not spent so much time on the side missions along the way, I most certainly would. In addition, you can continue to gain stats with Heroes after they reach max level (25) and can continue to gain Friendship with them after they reach rank 5, so there is character progression the whole way as well.

In terms of Pricepoint the game is listed at 59.99 USD which is an adequate number for the amount of content and the experience delivered. To me the combat and deck building, combined with the extraordinary animations make it worth that, but only because I liked that aspect so much was I able to bypass all other parts of the game by skipping through them (thankfully you can), and some people might not want to do that. I’d look to either get it at this price if you really enjoy good turn-based combat, or wait for a sale if this isn’t the most important aspect for you.

Final Thoughts

While Firaxis has shown they are more than capable of creating as good or better combat than X-COM in a brand new setting, they seem to struggle with aspects that were not a huge part of the X-COM franchise, namely storytelling and what sort of gameplay to have when the player is not in combat. Ironically, while some may have wished for a more story driven game with X-COM combat, I did not.

There were many times while playing Midnight Suns where I was simply frustrated that more love and care was not put into the mission development and enemy variety, because the core combat mechanics are ACES! It’s like someone let you drive their Ferrari, but you can only drive on a couple of roads and you can’t go over 40 miles an hour. Simply disappointing.

In conclusion, Midnight Suns can only get better with time. Assuming Firaxis adds more heroes, cards, enemies and villains, like they did to X-COM through expansions etc, then I’d wager Midnight Suns will be a much better game next December, unfortunately it won’t fix the other issues that plague the game outside of combat.

If you enjoyed our Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review, and you’re looking for more Marvel’s Midnight Suns content be sure to check our our Early Impressions as well as our many Build Guides for the game!