The Backlog: Marvel's Midnight Suns

 

It's rare that I play a game at release, but this is one of those times when I did. Because a Marvel RPG really appeals to me. For the record, I played this on Xbox because I'm wary of 2K on PC now that they're pushing yet another 3rd party game launcher on players.

You play as The Hunter. An ancient demon hunter who also happens to be the child of the main villain who is known as Lilith. There is some character creation involved as The Hunter can be either male or female.

The game starts with Hunter's aunt Caretaker more or less bringing the Midnight Suns team (Magik, Nico, Ghost Rider, and Blade) together with 3 of the Avengers (Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Captain Marvel) to aid you in your battle. More characters become available as the story progresses.

The combat features a card system which I remember a lot of people being worried about. But it doesn't work exactly how I imagined most people expected a card system to work. Honestly the cards could have just been called abilities and it wouldn't have changed anything. Each character has to equip 8 cards in their deck and during your turn in combat you'll draw 5 random cards from the combined pool your characters bring to the table.

I find this system enjoyable because unlike a lot of turn based systems, it prevents you from simply spamming the most powerful abilities over and over again. The RNG prevents that but there are also environmental interactions you can make to damage enemies that doesn't rely on cards. You can use environmental attacks as long as you currently have enough heroism points.

Every mission launches with this character stroll of your team

The character interactions with your team members are where the RPG elements really come into play. They definitely took inspiration from Bioware RPGs. You even have friendship values that you can raise with each character in order to earn bonuses.

Character interactions range from just having a quick conversation, hanging out for a relaxing activity such as playing cards, to a non existant snippet where you just pick one choice about your opinion on a random topic to get different rewards based on your choice.

There are also plenty of little easter eggs in these conversations. Such as Spider-Man bringing up his time with the symbiote, which leads to a dialogue option about his "emo phase" which is a reference to Spider-Man 3. Other times you'll get some prompts to state what your stance would have been during some major event that occured in the comics.

Blade asks how you would have sided in Civil War 2

The hub area is one of the most interesting but also most frustrating parts of the game however. While it is where you interact with the companions. But it's also got a bunch of terminals to obtain various items and an odd open world exploration element.

The Forge area allows you to open Gamma coils (basically random loot boxes for cards), Artifacts (I'll come back to this later), start research projects, and craft combat items. The Yard allows you to spar with the other heroes and upgrade cards in various ways. The mission room is where you pick to go out into combat but there is also a computer there to send characters out to handle random tasks  (making them unavailable until they return).

But the exploration is the worst part of the game by far. In most open exploration in RPGs you have the chance of running into NPCs, finding a quest, getting into a fight. But here it's pretty much unopposed exploration of the forest area surrounding the Abbey. There are puzzles to solve but otherwise it's mostly just you wandering around and picking things up.

This brings me to the fact that I think this game originally intended to have microtransactions included but due to recent backlash against them, they were removed. The game even has a microtransaction currency called Eclipse Coins but if you bought the Legendary Edition of the game you can't even use them for anything since they only can purchase costumes that come included in the Legendary Edition.

But there are also things called Arcane Chests you can find while exploring. They require keys to unlock that you find in limited quantities, including from sacrificing the earlier mentioned artifacts at a ceremonial alter. And yes, that is the only point of the artifacts. What do the chests contain? Mainly color palettes for character costumes.

You also find ingredients to be used at this witch's bowl in the library where you can... create combat items. Something you can normally do in the forge but there are certain items only available from the bowl. None of them are particularly necessary and I'd argue most of the forge items are better. But I'm sure the way your access to ingredients is limited by waiting for them to respawn mean this was another thing intended for microtransactions.

Even the randomness of the Gamma Coils seems like it was probably originally intended for microtransactions. Obviously, they changed things to mitigate this, but it leads to many things in the game feeling redundant because they're things you can honestly just ignore if you just wanna beat the game.

You can pet the hellhound

You can mostly ignore the exploration aspects of the game unless you want to get all the achievements. Which I did because I'm a bit of a completionist and that was by far the worst part of the game.

But overall I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Not only do you not need to know anything about the MCU to enjoy this game, I'd argue it might even be a good change of pace for people who are sick of the live action movies. But obviously some level of Marvel knowledge is kind of require to really get the game.

I'd recommend the game to anyone who is a fan of Marvel characters and turn based combat.