Marvel’s Midnight Suns
PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
The ‘KO’ that pops up whenever an enemy is defeated in Midnight Suns might insist that this is all good, clean, bloodless Marvel fun. But that’s a little hard to swallow as Blade darts between foes at supernatural speed, chaining katana slashes with salvos from his twin submachine guns. Or, indeed, as his teammate Captain Marvel pulls a telegraph pole from its mooring and brings it down on a pack of Hydra soldiers, then boots a straggler into a freshly opened hellmouth. A final victim is left bloodied but still standing – until Blade pounces, draining their life force in order to feed his own. He certainly seems every bit as deadly as his cinematic counterpart.
Back home at the Abbey, though, Blade is a pussycat, playing bigger brother to his teenaged teammates, and responsible for combat training and the odd yoga session. Later, after a session by the pool to take advantage of his immunity to sunlight, we offer him a gift to mark our growing friendship, and discover the Daywalker can appreciate a good candle as much as anyone. This isn’t a date, we should hasten to add – not least because Blade is busy crushing on Captain Marvel, who presumably caught his eye with her ability to reshape street furniture around Hydra skulls. In a fumbled effort to get closer to her, the vampiric hero ends up organising a book club for the entire team. He’s not gone entirely soft, though: the first book up for discussion is Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War.
This disjunct between Midnight Suns’ two sides takes a while to get used to. Sometimes you’re playing a lean tactical battler that evolves Firaxis’s work on the XCOM games in delightful new directions. At others, you might be on a fishing trip or a walk through the forest picking mushrooms or negotiating the tensions that arise from a team of superheroes living together in a confined space. Namely, the Abbey, a spooky commune tucked into an interdimensional pocket behind Salem, Massachusetts, to which you return after each battle.
It’s a hub explored not as Blade, nor any of the other heroes on loan from Marvel, but as the Hunter, a character of your creation (see ‘Which Hunt’). There’s a touch of Destiny 2’s Tower to it, as you walk between NPCs who are essentially menus with faces, depositing resources and collecting rewards. That’s every morning, before you head into the day’s main mission. In the evening it’s the setting for Persona-style social interactions, letting you select heroes for a hangout, boosting your relationship score for a variety of bonuses in combat and elsewhere. Throughout the day, you’re free to wander the grounds, where light puzzles and Metroidvania elements await.
In truth, listing everything that’s been crammed into the Abbey would take up the rest of these pages. Suffice it to say, it includes a crafting system, a fictional socialmedia service and – no joke – the ability to collect, and decorate your digs with, 17th-century paintings. All this, understandably, takes time to introduce. But coming off the back of Marvel Snap, which does everything it can to get you back into a match as quickly and often as possible, it initially feels as languorous as the opening hours of a JRPG. We’re eager to shake off the distractions and get at the real meat of the game. Which, this being a Firaxis title, is the turn-based combat.
Midnight Suns deviates from the XCOM format in many ways, the biggest of which is eschewing dice rolls in favour of a deck of cards. It’s more or less the only random element in a combat system that’s otherwise deterministic. As in Into The Breach or Slay The Spire, you can see which enemies intend to attack on their next turn, and exactly how much damage they’ll do. And as in those games, your job is to then find a way to walk between the raindrops.
Exactly how is left up to you, as you mull over the wide variety of tools at your disposal. Battlefields are littered with environmental weapons – stacks of Daily Bugles, electrical outlets, the occasional telegraph pole – which you can either throw at foes, or throw foes into. You can charge into enemies, knocking them backwards for both damage and positioning purposes. Most decisive of all, though, are the cards that represent these heroes’ abilities: superpowered punches and laser beams and magic spells.
While battles themselves are tight little things, the maximalist spirit of the Abbey is once again at work in its card design. Each hero builds their own deck of eight from a pool of character-specific cards, which are generally focused on one or two keywords that can be mixed and matched. Blade specialises in bleed and lifesteal, the former chipping away at its victims’ health bars turn after turn, the latter using damage to heal him. Fairly standard concepts in a game such as this, though here they’re entangled in some deliciously inventive ways.
Blade is a relatively vanilla example. His favourite Captain, meanwhile, has a dedicated meter that fills up with each card she plays. Once maxed, she can transform into her Binary persona, protecting her from a few hundred points of damage and doubling her damage until those defences have been drained; you’ll be wanting to point all enemies in her direction with taunt cards, and ideally set her up to counter too. Iron Man can use the game’s redraws (of which you get two per turn in case of a bad hand) to tinker with his abilities and upgrade them into more powerful Mk 2 versions. Magik, a lesser-known X-Men character, is able to place portals anywhere on the field and then kick enemies through them, into explosive barrels or one another – or, better still, the nearest ravine.
Every single member of Midnight Suns’ dozen-strong roster is like this, characterful and luxurious in their mechanical design. Familiarity with the cast is rewarded: knowing that Nico Minoru is a runaway teenage witch whose spells can only ever be cast once, for example,
Captain Marvel presumably caught his eye with her ability to reshape street furniture around Hydra skulls
adds an extra level of appreciation to the fact that her cards have the unique ‘Roulette’ keyword, which randomises their effects every time you draw them. It’s working at a very different scale to Snap, in which the entirety of each hero or villain is represented by a single card, but between the two – along with the recent Marvel Champions on the tabletop – we can’t help but wonder if cards might the best way of realising this larger-than-life ensemble in interactive fashion. They’re all certainly more successful than the other recent effort in videogames, Marvel’s Avengers.
There are, however, slight shades of that game’s uncanny-valley knockoffs back at the Abbey. Graphically, the game is better suited to the overhead zoomed-out view, and when the masks come off, there can be a slight doughiness to the faces. The writing fares better, displaying affection for the source material, but there’s an awful lot of it. Conversations adhere to the old JRPG school of writing, where every character must offer their perspective on every subject discussed, ideally multiple times. Walking through one of the mansion’s common areas, meanwhile, can feel like being at a party where you don’t know anyone: you tune in and out of conversations without ever really managing to follow any of them.
This is evocative, in a way, if not one we suspect is intentional. But we learn to treat it as background colour, something that becomes easier as, over the (many) hours, the game’s rhythm changes. You’re increasingly free to skip Abbey time entirely, or to focus on the characters who interest you most. (Daywalker aside, in our case it’s Magik and Nico, who have the advantages both of being less overexposed in other media than, say, Tony Stark and of being teenagers and thus better suited to the
high-drama tenor of shared-accommodation storylines.) Having to stop in at the Abbey every morning and evening stops feeling like a chore, and becomes a pleasant change of pace, especially since the overloaded nature of its design means we can pick and choose which elements we fancy engaging with each time. A spot of exploration here, a little socialising there – it goes a long way.
And there’s another influence at work in these parts, one so obvious we almost neglected to mention it: XCOM. If that game’s base-building was a kind of antiextraterrestrial military formicarium, here you’re shrunk to the size of an ant and dropped inside. Research tasks can be set in motion, their rewards collected the following day, with multiple other threads that feed in and out of the tactical layer. If Blade gets hurt in combat, and isn’t able to bloodsuck his way back to health, he’ll come back injured, with a disadvantage that will carry over into his next mission. Drop him off at the Abbey’s spa, however, and tomorrow he’ll be healed and have some temporary perk to reflect his rested state.
And so, slowly, a rhythm builds. Morning gives way to the nine-to-five of hero work and then into evening, a loop as irresistible as any game by Firaxis, undisputed master of the ‘just one more turn’, with each new day at the Abbey offering some fresh incentive. A combination of mission and character picked because it will open new avenue of research; a theorised card synergy in need of testing; a blossoming relationship in which we’ve grown invested. Another of those gorgeously terse battles? Yes, please. But first we’d rather like to know how Blade’s book club is coming along.