Midnight Suns Marvel Studios New Game 2022 Review
Game Review
Stop Lilith
The story behind it all begins with HYDRA scientist Doctor Faustus resurrecting Lilith in hopes of using her to help HYDRA conquer the world. With an enemy too powerful for our heroes, including Doctor Strange, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel, Wanda Maximoff stays behind to fight Lilith, while the others retreat to the Abbey, recruit the Midnight Suns, and resurrect the Hunter, a new hero that can be randomly customized. Become Lilith's child and slayer.
From here, the game really begins as you take control of the Hunter and team up with various heroes to conquer missions, gaining strength to capture Lilith and put an end to her evil ways. Along the way you'll encounter a variety of enemies, both supernatural and human, with some mini-bosses thrown in for good measure.
Building these Socials
I've mentioned the social aspect of this game before, and Midnight Suns essentially builds its gameplay around a "morning, mission, night" format. You can help them with simple tasks, join them for a date and even participate in daily sparring.
All of these tasks feed into a larger relationship system, so the more time you spend with that character, the higher your relationship level increases. This works to give extra boosts in combat, including stat buffs. Dialogue is a whole different ball game, and while the voice acting is all-around good, some of the social options don't really fit the characters you're using. And that's before we mention the more Gen Z-oriented language, complete with multiple colloquial language options.
Also in today's installment of the game, you can choose to explore upgrades in the Abbey, from taking on enemies.
Resource Management
These resources become the bread and butter of your game time, as they are crucial to improving your skills and strengthening your team. There's Gloss, which works as an aesthetic currency, Credits, your primary source of currency, and Essence, which comes in the form of Skill, Heroic, and Attack formats. All of these can be obtained in battle either from rewards given at the end of the battle, or by interrogating enemies or completing certain tasks.
If that wasn't enough, there are also Hero Operations that can be done in this stage, which allow you to send a hero into a single-handed battle against HYDRA's thugs. However, if you get duplicates of the same card, you can upgrade the cards in the Abbey's Courtyard, allowing you to create a more powerful version of this ability.
It's a bit of a stretch though, give it 7 or so in-game days and you'll have a good groove for balancing all those different quests.
Battle
After you exhaust this area, Midnight Suns becomes a battle, which can be accessed via the table in the middle of the War Room. Here you can choose to do "Common Missions", which are side quests that work to increase your resources. Story Missions advance the game.
Combat takes place on a relatively small playing field, using cards to move the battle. Each time you go, you draw a few cards that represent actions your characters can take. Hunter has a choice of Light and Dark attacks (which vary slightly depending on dialogue options to be friendly or mean to your teammates), and others like a myriad of different moves and playstyles.
Finding a system that works for you is part of the fun in Midnight Suns, and by the end of the game you'll have used almost every character at your disposal. What's particularly interesting here is how different everyone plays. Ghost Rider uses more of a risk/reward system, with some attacks clearing all cards in your hand for massive attack power, or even applying Life Steal on characters by chaining enemies together and subsequently increasing Ghost Rider's max HP. Meanwhile, Wanda and Nico use magic to enchant your allies or curse your enemies.
There are also all-rounders with average offense and decent skills, such as Doctor Strange and Captain America, who can boost defenses or use spells to turn the tide of battle. Before you mention characters like Blade and Wolverine, who are all about big, fast attacks.
Strategy and Depth
Mixing and matching heroes until you have the perfect setup is part of the fun of Midnight Suns, and I personally found Blade to be the best hero. His attack is unbeatable and he can really turn the tide of the battle in your favor.
The enemies you fight are less impressive. The boss battles offer a nice change of pace, but mostly the game uses the same enemy assets over and over again.
These enemies have some variety, with shielded HP tanks protecting assets on the battlefield. You also have the usual easy-to-beat grunts like soldiers and dogs. As the game progresses, HYDRA soldiers are replaced by supernatural enemies, including Nest Mothers who cast shrines on the battlefield to power their attacks. Sending these allows for good damage bypassing the shielded Guardian that usually guards it.
There is a surprising amount of strategy built into this system, allowing you to use 3 card games per round as well as environmental attacks. Each simple attack can increase your Hero meter, which in turn unlocks more powerful attacks to deal massive damage. Quick attacks will give you a free card game if you manage to KO the enemy, in the middle of all this you can redraw 2 cards from your hand hoping for better attacks. Items don't use Card games and can give things like extra moves on the battlefield or stat buffs for the next round.
Objectives in said battles range from rescuing civilians and stopping HYDRA helicopters from fleeing to surviving multiple turns without being KO'd. There's a lot of variety on offer here, and Midnight Suns does a decent job of really leaning into that to give each story mission something different.
Quite often, you'll find that one character will do all the heavy lifting while the other heroes watch the battle unfold. Unless you're dodging projectiles (which happens surprisingly less than you'd expect) or setting up an environmental attack, there's no point in moving. Healing is also limited to Hunter unless you craft items.
Evening Events
In the evening, the Abbey opens once again for you to meet your crew and explore the Abbey grounds. Surprisingly, there are a number of side quests around the area, though most result in simple quest quests. There are also Challenges that come in the form of a Hunter going it alone with his trusty Hellhound Charlie to unlock more powers and additional abilities for the Hunter to use in battle.
Additionally, you can collect ingredients to use to craft resources in Agatha's cauldron. Oh, and be sure to love your trusty hellhound companion Charlie, too, for some bonus resources.
General Considerations
Midnight Suns is very elegant, and as an accessible tactical RPG, it has a lot going for it. You can tell that developer Firaxis Games put a lot of thought into this game and made sure that the game strikes a balance between offering some depth in tactical combat and jumping in with newcomers. this system is correct, but as I said before, the enemy variety and some of the combat mechanics are a bit problematic.
Midnight Suns is definitely worth checking out, despite the aforementioned issues. The game has a lot going for it and the story is actually pretty interesting across the board. There's a lot of potential for the future with this one, and considering Marvel's tumultuous year, it might just be the brightest star in the multiverse right now.
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