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.