Last week, Blade and I went to a book group one evening. Actually, it was Blade’s idea. We had two captains present: Captain Marvel and Captain America, so we were almost covered with captains. once setting everything up to spend time with Captain Marvel, Blade was too shy to refuse the other captain’s request once they overheard. The Art of War was studied. It was chosen by Blade. We discussed the tactics and insight found in the text, and someone brought up the amusing fact that Blade’s favorite book was authored by a person going by the name “Sun”. Ironic given that Blade is a vampire, huh? Following the book club meeting, Iron Man and I went mushroom hunting. Quite amazingly, they are not the babbling of a person who has just fallen off a shelf.

Because it’s also Firaxis’ Marvel’s Midnight Suns, this is Marvel’s Midnight Suns, a game worth being enthusiastic about. You select Marvel heroes to fight Hydra and other opponents in turn-based, card-heavy combat in this tactics game. However, the game also revolves around strengthening the bonds between a group of dissimilar, acrimonious superhumans who have been compelled to dwell outside of time and space in an enigmatic abbey due to the danger of an ancient evil. It’s Fire Emblem and XCOM. In addition to being a blockbuster about the end of the world, it tells the tale of a very demanding home share.

We will revisit topics such as the book club shortly. Now let’s get to the action, the cards, the turns, and the strategy. Stretching like a flexible and reliable spine through the midsection of the game, these missions have story-based and optional elements and have you teaming up with three superheroes to take on villains. After selecting your mission from a classy pool table in the Abbey, you set off to see New York, the Midwest, and other locations that I definitely shouldn’t reveal. There’s a small theatrical element to simply taking off since this is Firaxis. You had the Skyranger in XCOM, with all of your soldiers crammed inside while you awaited the LZ. In Midnight Suns, you must sprint towards a cliff where the superhero with portal abilities, Magick, has sliced a massive hole in the sky, into which you must naturally dive. It’s beautiful stuff.

It took me some getting acclimated to battling here because I was coming from XCOM combat. You can still feel the distinct staccato beat of Firaxis’ turn-based combat as the camera pans about and you make moves. Everything is there, including the Wildean visiting-cards manners-play of applying status effects at the conclusion of a turn. However, the nature of movement is very different as you are not racing to cover ground or on a grid. I felt a little disoriented for a time since there were battles I could almost recognize but not as much to cling to.

It all became evident to me over time. You may play three cards from your deck each round. Your deck is dealt from a pool consisting of the individual decks of each of your mission heroes. Cards can be either Attacks (use Captain America’s shield to hit targets if you’ve brought him along) or Skills (use bleed to counterattacks or apply counter to your allies). They could also be heroic. Similar to mana, heroism doesn’t just happen. It takes work. It is obtained by using Attack and Skill cards, each of which has a Heroism payment that will unavoidably influence your choices. Once you have a lot of Heroism, you may use it to purchase a Heroic card. This is a tremendously strong move, similar to Captain Marvel’s photon beam technique, where she uses her Heroism to toast anybody who is in her way by turning into a radioactive hairdryer with a very tight focus. Because heroic cards require heroism, you must constantly consider the pace and available resources throughout a battle—that is, how to balance the play of inexpensive heroism-building cards against costly heroism-spending cards. However, heroism may also be used for other purposes.

It may be used for environmental assaults, such as punting a sofa across a room and eliminating a number of enemies at once, or picking up a stack of the Daily Bugle and hitting a Hydra soldier with it. Outside of the three card plays you can perform each round, environmental assaults exist. You may continue till you run out of props to strike people with if you have the heroism to pay for them. They also force you to consider your position on the battlefield, especially in relation to your adversaries, and they draw you further back into reality. Is it possible to induce a group of them to congregate around an oil barrel? Is it possible to place a few of them near a rock that you could throw?

You can move one character once every turn in addition to card plays and environmental attacks. This is quite useful in conflicts if there are additional layers, such as aerial bombardment indicated by ground markers or a grenade that will explode in two cards. In addition, you can employ battlefield items—which are essentially XCOM’s special items—or redraw two cards per round. Any of these might change the course of a conflict.

And they are only the tip of the iceberg. You have to contend with a variety of opponent types in addition to mission goals that change and environmental traps and gimmicks. Personally, I detest enemies that split into two or share a pool of HP that they redistribute when they are hurt. Some are completely healthy and die at a single blow, which greatly enhances heroism. There will be bosses that are either there because the plot demands it or who are interfering with a normal mission in order to complicate matters. Whoa, what flies!

And then there are your heroes, with their individual priorities. I adored using Captain Marvel in combat since she was all about applying brutal beatdowns, and she had a ton of cards at her disposal to target troublesome opponents—as the enemy kinds indicate, target prioritization is often the main focus of battles—and basically throw people around. However, there are characters who can somewhat mitigate the harm, such as Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, who serve as supporting cast members. The Hunter is the character you play as; in story missions, you have to lead them into battle and manage them about the abbey. They are just as customizable as the sliders and other elements that determine their appearance. I believe they are a brand-new character that was made specifically for this game, and you may choose how they behave. Any hero you send on a mission with them has an expanding deck of cards (we’ll get to that), which makes selecting only eight for a load-out the most excruciating form of strategy game torment.

The playing cards! The fact that Midnight Suns is a real card game rather than merely a UI-based card game where cards are used to manage spells and assaults surprises me every time I play. In addition to attack cards and buffs, there are cards that have an effect on other cards. For example, a card may provide heroism while also adding a few extra cards to your hand or it may offer you a strong move that destroys a random card. Even before you reach cards that let you pair heroes together for truly amazing actions, there are synergies to be discovered everywhere. It’s also always worthwhile to read the fine print. While the damage is impressive, is the card also capable of causing knockback, which essentially converts the battlefield into a pool table? Does it possess rapidity, meaning that if you use the attack to kill someone, you will just receive the card play back and not the actual card? And this is only the beginning of the complexity.

When you include in those unique mission kinds—in fact, the missions that are created through a procedural process are very engaging—Midnight Suns becomes a genuine joy to play on the battlefield. For example, I had the most amazing mission last night. Instead of taking out every enemy or gathering a doodad, my task was to just make it through four waves of foes. The surprise was that, when I killed low level foes, I got back a card play, while high level enemies awarded me fresh cards. Combining those two criteria allowed me to build up amazing kill totals: five knockouts from a single hero (likely Ghost Rider, who essentially runs people over in his special), and seven knockouts in a single turn. It seemed like I was dealing with a few tiny mini gods out there, even if it was tactical. It used regulations to sell the idea of being a superhero.

I think there’s a lot to say about this. How brilliant game designers like the Firaxis team can show that Marvel’s creators were also quite strong game designers, and how superheroes are already essentially collections of rules. However, we must go on. Although the battlefield serves as the main emphasis of Midnight Suns, there are other aspects of the game as well.

A beautiful 3D hub for video games, the abbey is a great place to go outside of combat. It has many of interesting elements, such miniature ladders on the library shelves and floating lights in the forge. The abbey is essentially a menu drawn in geometry, just like the HQ from XCOM, but it’s also much more than that.

In actuality, it might be quite overwhelming, but to put it simply, what occurs in the abbey has an impact on the heroes and abilities you possess when fighting. They battle it out on the streets of New York and beyond before returning home to the abbey, where the action shifts from day to day and occasionally even into people’s dreams as your heroes bond, create friendships, and eventually fall out.

It all comes down to creating friends at the most fundamental level. You may be able to use more special moves on the battlefield the closer you are to another hero. As you play as Hunter and figure out what to do with your free time each day, you gain friends by giving heroic compliments and hanging out with them for the evening, maybe going to the gym to play pool or seek for mushrooms. I’m not here to pass judgment.

You converse, and the responses you select let you lead your specific Hunter down either a bright or dark road, either of which, you got it, offers them alternatives for fighting. Heroes might be gifted things, or you can choose to spar with them. As the numbers rise, it’s entertaining to watch these well-known faces conversing about various topics. Marvel is especially well-suited for this because all of its heroes are so flawed and prone to arguments. For example, Midnight Suns makes a lot of stuff on how conceited Tony Stark is and how difficult it is to be a super squad in the shadow of the Avengers.)

There are more areas in the third-person, XCOM-like monastery that you may explore. There are areas where you may level them up, unlock and select the cards you win in each combat, conduct research to open up new menus, and send characters on background missions that provide you amazing items but temporarily disable your hero. Again, this is complex stuff, but in the end, it all boils down to assembling a team and allocating resources to increase your squad’s effectiveness or dexterity in combat.

However, that isn’t totally accurate. It’s not as simple as that. It is true that you can observe the benefits of each encounter in the abbey, including how your stats change, what you select and what you ignore, how alliances form and dissolve, and how your own good and evil sides balance out. Firaxis excels at this things, especially the old-fashioned ploy of giving you something amazing at the expense of something else that would have also been wonderful. Yes, strategy games do incite players to concentrate just on the practicality of each system and interaction due to their intricate bird’s nest mechanisms.

However, it goes beyond all of that. There’s more going on here than just usefulness, similar to Fire Emblem, for example. Take a look at the book club: a whole evening spent discussing Blade’s readings. Until you realize that going to Blade’s book club was worth it in and of itself, the scattered friend points you receive for that do not seem totally valuable. Likewise, spending time with Captain Marvel. The same goes for investing money to improve the appearance of your bedroom: picking a better afternoon sweater to wear, moving the artwork on the walls, and selecting the ideal couch and bedside table. The same goes for meandering about the grounds of the abbey, which offers benefits of course, but also gives you the impression that you’re part of a few fascinating riddles that will take some time to solve. (I believe there’s a whole XBLA game set in the abbey grounds that has nothing to do with turn-based combat and everything to do with exploration and storyline.)

This is an excellent tactical and strategic game—that is, one where every element contributes to something else in the stats table. However, the main reason it’s a fantastic game overall is that it loves its surface-level relationships, friendships, movie evenings, and unexpected explosions. The care and attention to detail that goes into this material elevates it above the surface. That convent! In addition to the fact that the doll’s home is a beautiful and intriguing object and that playing with dolls—even virtual ones—can be somewhat uplifting, you return there after every mission with the intention of improving as a soldier. It helps you to step outside of yourself.

Who in the library left the brie on the counter? Who is making jokes on the superhero social network? Midnight Suns makes me think of the long ago days I spent playing with my Ghostbusters toys at home while I was in elementary school. Naturally, I sent them out to kill demons and capture spirits. However, I also spent an odd amount of time in their imagined homes, putting them to bed or preparing supper in the fire station (which for me was an old bookshelf with pieces of cardboard tacked on). Meanwhile, my daughter’s dollhouse has taken over the living room for a long time due to the bizarre soap opera it creates. After being married to Summer Barbie, the two divorced, and Batman is currently employed at the post office. Skipper was a climber in the 5×5 Kallax until her leg snapped off and needed to be mended with a piece of plumber’s tape. (At this time, Cat Noir has been in the bathroom for eighteen months and counting.)

I never expected to be considering these things while playing a game that simultaneously pushes me to make the best use of my resources on the battlefield and has a spell that, when used properly, lets you shower enemy dogs down from the sky, much to their thudding disadvantage. But then, that’s Marvel, I suppose, those ill-tempered heroes whose powers come with vanity and frailties. And that’s Firaxis, whose teams, the last time I was at the studio, worked in small, collegiate-style groups in a variety of rooms that resemble the dormitories in the abbey, and who understand that a good headquarters is always more than simply a posh method to get food.

A basic idea that fails to spark and terrible writing undermine the otherwise captivating spirit of early-aughts double-A gaming.
The marketing materials for Wanted: Dead characterize the game as a “love letter to the sixth generation of consoles,” which includes the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube. It’s the creation of veterans from that era; Takayuki Kikuchi, a former employee of Tecmo whose credentials include the original Ninja Gaiden, formed the development company Soleil. It’s ironic that intense and persistent distaste may often accompany a love affair, and I’m not a big fan of Wanted: Dead. I don’t enjoy storyline that is 70% playing about with cop movie clichés, wave-based confrontations that often butcher you just before a checkpoint, or abrupt, pseudo-Gearsy shooting. I dislike campaign design that appears to be mostly used for Easter eggs and one-off vignettes. These items don’t appeal to me at all. However, I do sort of adore them.

I suspect the reason I love them is that I belong to the target audience of Wanted: Dead, which is early middle-aged players who came of age during the golden age of the “double-A game” – in other words, games from the early days of broadband, before Naughty Dog and Ubisoft made every third-person rival learn parkour and court comparison with HBO, before Steam became ubiquitous and trade-ins became extinct, and before every game required a season pass and a loot treadmill. During this period, there were less established ideas about what a videogame should accomplish, thus mid-tier 3D action games in particular were allowed to be unpolished, raw, brutal, brazenly slammed together, and, very frequently, an entire pile of arse. The concept of “double-A” seems to have been invented by nutters who could never move on from Midway’s passing, so I’m not convinced it ever truly happened. But whether it’s a rose-colored illusion or not, it perfectly matches Wanted: Dead.

After an introductory news broadcast with Thatcher and Yeltsin—of which I can only remember the phrase “a failure of common sense”—Wanted puts you in the shoes of Hannah Stone, a cyborg in sneakers with a katana who leads the infamous “Zombie Squad” of former convicts turned enforcers in a near-future version of Hong Kong. Over the course of a week in-game, Stone and her roughneck allies will investigate an android conspiracy; nevertheless, the writing frequently prioritizes slice-of-life humor over story development, with whole sequences centered to the group’s eating of ramen.

Throughout the campaign, you’ll travel to parks, clubs, and warehouses that are made up of hallways and wide areas with far checkpoints. There, you’ll battle a monotonous group of grunts, ninjas, and mech men before finishing the campaign with an exhausting bossfight that follows a set pattern. As generic as it sounds, it’s a structure I haven’t quite seen since the PS2: in particular, the lack of a save-anywhere function trains you to be careful with the few healthpacks you carry about and highlights how much the game design relies on arbitrary pop-up reinforcements. The content in between missions, however, is more reminiscent of later action games, especially Platinum’s Astral Chain: you roam around a police station gathering case files for experience points, chit-chatting with anonymous officers (of whom half work carrying boxes), and engaging in one of the numerous, entertaining, but unnecessary minigames, which vary from rhythm-matching karaoke to arcade cabinet shmups.

I try to maintain better company than this, but I like the thought of cooling my feet with secondary characters, especially in a game as brutal as Wanted can be. Resurrected from the putrefying depths of Blockbuster Videos by a severely abused ChatGPT customer, the basic cast consists of an offensive foursome of friends from the 1980s. A comedic sexpest with go-faster hair and scars offers jokes that should make you cringe but are basically incomprehensible. A cutesy take on The Simpsons’ crazy cat woman is matched with him. Fans of bad casting may anticipate not just a permanently enraged Black chief of police, but also a silent Black squad member who goes on a mission with you to a bar named Deaf Panther. There are noticeable breaks in consistency between the main and background speech, and the prose is generally sour and inadequately localized. The voice acting is quite terrible; one of the funnier scenes in the game is a dance floor battle when a single, very worn-out-sounding VA has to play twelve bouncers at once. The icing on the cake is Stone herself, a scenery-chewing Tommy Wiseau-level character who constantly sounds like she’s just woken up.

Larger plot beats include some rather fluid—if not particularly mind-expanding—discussions about artificial sentience, during which the prose somewhat improves. In another heartwarming memory, Stone must console a little child whose mother has been killed. However, as soon as you venture back outside into the station, playground songs like “What are you searching for in the interrogation room? Torment?” I find the diversity of ethnicities in that station to be fascinating; I suppose this is a reflection of the idea of cyberpunk Hong Kong as a melting pot of cultures, but it probably has more to do with the conditions of production: some police officers speak like Ealing Comedy wannabes, while others sound like the high school kids who get smashed in the first twenty minutes of Spider-Man movies.

Generally speaking, the script’s more delicate moments have the effect of making the jokes elsewhere appear purposeful, which is a punchline I can totally get behind—but not when it’s stretched out over ten hours of intriguing but ultimately boring breach-and-clear. To start, there’s a certain flair to Wanted’s fighting. Stone uses her left hand to execute katana combos while alternating them with her right hand’s automatically targeted pistol blasts. The purpose of the pistol isn’t actually to cause damage; rather, it’s to deflect enemy strikes and weaken them with combinations that start with a gunshot and propel you into close quarters. This interaction may be fulfilling. Despite her shortcomings as a conversationalist, Stone has a nice appearance when speaking. Combining elements of Raiden and Solid Snake, she can move quickly through gunfire and retaliate with gunfire when enemies are having trouble moving, then destroy them with swipes that create beautiful gore loops in their wake.

The pistol’s demotion in the game to a supporting role is reminiscent of Bloodborne. Another feature in Echo of that game is a rally system that allows you to quickly execute a scripted ending animation on an opponent who is stunned in order to replenish part of your lost health. Finishers are unstoppable spells that shift Stone to the side of their target; they are frequently just as effective at preventing harm as they are at dealing it. The last layer of melee fighting is a focus gauge that fills up with each strike or parry and may be used to prepare a crowd of finishers with slow motion gun salvos.

The tutorials in the game do a terrible job of explaining the strategy behind this quite unique version of CQC; they essentially merely take you through button inputs before plunging you headfirst into duels with opponents who have the ability to kill you in a single combination. Specifically, it took me some time to figure out how to use the handgun. Additionally, there’s maybe not enough to unlock: With three skill trees—one for melee—Stone has access to a variety of abilities, most of which are standard fare like wider parry windows and one additional hit for your opening combination. since of this, the sword-and-pistol fighting never progresses above the first complex alchemy. The bossfights are the closest to this transcending of itself since they focus a lot on precise parrying and animation reading. The fairly enjoyable physical fighting in Wanted, however, is paired with a cover-based shooting system that is, at best, clumsy and broken. This is the game’s biggest flaw.

Aside from her handgun, Stone also carries a moderately customizable assault rifle and a number of collectible weapons, including SMGs and rocket launchers, which she manually aims from an over-the-shoulder vantage point. The game’s signature move is combining these fighting styles, but in reality, those Gears of War references are clumsily done and just serve to detract from the overall experience. Thankfully, Stone is considerably more resistant to bullets than she is to bats, hammers, and swords. The cover-locking is slick and spiteful, dumping you into the open like a neighbor’s unwanted cat when you turn the camera too abruptly. Every shooting layout in Wanted has to double as a hack-and-slash arena, where excessively “magnetic” surfaces would be an annoyance. This is why there’s no context-sensitive magic, no automatic cornering, and no switching between cover spots like there was in Gears.

Finding a good view position is not always easy, since throwing a grenade through a door will likely cause it to bounce off the wall you’re hiding behind. Your Zombie Squad friends, who scamper all around shooting constantly and yelling at you while inflicting negligible damage, are the grace notes holding this ridiculous symphony together. Sometimes they can aid you out by reviving an opponent or pinning them down, but generally they merely serve to make it difficult for you to figure out where the frontline is.

Most of the time, you can ignore the cover-shooting, but occasionally, it’s forced upon you in the form of boss encounters and chokepoints. It’s also difficult to avoid the thought that the sword-and-pistol combat would be far superior if Soleil had reallocated the development resources involved. Throughout, there is a clear lack of focus, with certain parts included just for fun. The “wrong number” meme is recreated throughout loading breaks, the narrative is presented in chic but shrug-inducing anime shorts, and there’s a ridiculous joke about censoring chainsaw executions in a game where every 1v1 ends in dismemberment. Although it creates a visually striking trailer montage, it doesn’t blend in with the rest of the film convincingly. It also worries me about the developers at the bottom of the hierarchy. As simple as it is to paint Wanted’s missteps as intriguing eccentricities, they also point to a senior creative who uses Twitter excessively and makes erratic demands on a staff that is overburdened.

Double-A games were appealing in part because, as I’ve come to understand them, they showed off their chaos. Third-person games from the sixth generation stand out to me in especially for its alternating displays of nervous and arrogant splicing. That era’s games are replete with “X+Y” elements, from Devil May Cry’s reinterpretation of weaponry to extend a combo to less popular but nevertheless adored oddities like Psi-Ops, the telekinetic blaster, or The Suffering, which is like Silent Hill meets Rune.

Once more, even at its ugliest moments, I can’t help but be fond of Wanted because it captures the lost, utterly chaotic spirit of the early 2000s. At a time when all games that cost more than a certain amount of money appear to have merged into one glossy, obscenely detailed, open-world action-RPG with service-game components, it’s unsettling to open a game that looks more like a box of broken toys at a car boot sale. Though there’s something in this wobbly vintage pastiche that begs to be understood, recognized, if not embraced, I can’t suggest the outcomes with a clear conscience.