Marvel's Midnight Suns

I’m two years late to Marvel’s Midnight Suns, but it is probably my 2024 game of the year. I was as surprised as anybody when Firaxis got a license from Marvel to make a turn-based card game, but they did a legitimately great job.

It came out in 2022 and I heard good things, but never pulled the trigger until it eventually came to PlayStation Plus Extra. I was having so much fun that I ended up buying the season pass, which introduced 4 additional superheroes midway through my playthrough. It took me 92 hours to finish the base game and all the DLC content.

Marvel's Midnight Suns (2022)

Completed

Overview

The game is basically a Marvel superhero-themed turn-based tactics deck-building RPG dating sim game with a morality system. There are basically two parts to the game: combat missions and the Abbey.

The Abbey is a base where you can interact with your superhero friends, build upgrades, and explore the grounds. You can customize the heroes and the Abbey, level them up, build your relationships, and craft new cards/upgrades.

Superheroes team up on combat missions, each fighting with unique abilities randomly pulled from your assembled deck of cards. The battles are turn-based, with a variety of objectives and enemies.

Before launch, the online chatter was all “XCOM with Marvel superheroes,” but that isn’t really accurate. It’s made by the same studio (Firaxis) and lead designer (Jake Solomon), but the gameplay is quite different. The main similarity is that it’s turn-based combat with a strategy layer. The battles play out very differently, due to the card-based play, the variety of superheroes, and level design, and the out-of-combat content is quite different.

There are 13 superheroes (plus 4 with the DLC), which includes the Hunter, a unique hero created for the game. That gave them the freedom to write a new story, and allows you to completely customize your version of the Hunter. I didn’t have a problem with that, but since I’m mostly an MCU fan rather than a comic book reader, I wouldn’t have noticed if they reused another character or plotline.

Combat is powered by hero cards, which are randomly drawn from a customizable deck for each character. Each hero has their own deck of combat cards, with more cards than you need so you can customize the deck depending on how you want to play them. Each turn you get so many plays, then the enemy takes a turn, and so on.

You can shove enemies into each other, off ledges, into traps, etc. Environmental effects can also be used to your advantage (or disadvantage).

Unlike XCOM, most actions don’t include any randomness, but you have to adapt to which cards turn up in your hand.

My Thoughts

This is arguably the best superhero game I’ve ever played:

• There’s a roster of 17 heroes that you can bring into battle, customize, woo, etc.
• Each superhero has their own abilities, and they can play off each other’s abilities to great effect
• There’s a million voiced lines in this game (probably), including interactions between pairs of heroes for specific scenes

It really gives you those superhero team-up vibes.

I pretty much always took the Hunter into battle (for the friendship bonuses!), but I rotated through all the heroes. None of them are bad and I enjoyed playing with most of them, but you need to play to their strengths to be most effective.

I’m not much of a min-maxer so I didn’t play on the hardest difficulty, but it was still very satisfying to pull off complicated combos.

The story was fine; pretty typical Marvel fare, nothing to complain about. It is actually a pretty long game, with twists and turns and to keep things interesting. Cinematics were surprisingly good as well. I had mixed thoughts on the Abbey sections, but I think it did a good job of mixing in downtime between missions, and giving time to interact with all the superheroes.

The voiced character lines were incredible, including all kinds of banter between characters, quips, etc. Romance feels like it should have been included, but it wasn’t, which is a bit of a missed opportunity.

It took me a second to warm up to the non-MCU versions of all the characters, but they all grew on me by the end (even Tony Stark).

Disappointing Sales

The game was favorably reviewed with a 83 on Metacritic, but flopped commercially. A tweet from Jason Schreier:

Some news: Marvel’s Midnight Suns was a critical success but a commercial flop. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told me in an interview this afternoon that “it’s possible the release window wasn’t perfect” but that he thinks it could have a long tail, like other Firaxis games

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) February 6, 2023

That’s pretty unfortunate since it’s such a great game. It’s easy to imagine additional content (there are a lot of empty rooms in the Abbey), or a sequel that builds on this one.

It appeared in PlayStation Plus Extra in March 2024, and Epic Game Store offered it as a free game in June 2024. So perhaps the long tail didn’t quite pan out.

The issue could have been release window timing, or unfavorable comparisons to XCOM, or maybe turn-based deck-builder combat isn’t as broadly popular as hoped. Alternately, maybe we’ve all consumed a decade of Marvel content and just burned out on it.

Conclusion

Admittedly, it is a pretty unusual mashup of gameplay, but I think it works. Execution is top-notch, which is only to be expected from Firaxis.

If you’re here for an XCOM-style game, this may or may not be for you. Just keep in mind that a good 50% of the game is spent in the Abbey, not in combat, and you need to be okay with that. If you’re here for a superhero game, you’re in for a treat.

As I said at the beginning, it’s probably my 2024 game of the year. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a must-play for any fan of superhero games or turn-based tactics, and I am here for whatever Jake Solomon or Firaxis does next.