Card-Based Marvel's Midnight Suns - Marvel universe card-based tactical RPG from Firaxis

[Wirdschowerdn]

It's currently free on the Epic Games Store.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

So is this game good or not? I liked XCOM:EU and XCOM 2. I don't give a shit about Marvel and comics. As long as the gameplay is good they can put Batman in a pink overall for all I care. What exactly do cards do in this game? Does it play like XCOM or is this some magic the gathering shit? The screenshots and trailers don't exactly make this look like a good turn-based strategy game.

Yes, the gameplay is good. It's more like a tactical TB party-based RPG with premade characters rather than anything like XCom.

Hm, I think I'll give Phoenix Point a go first and try this out afterwards.

 

[Lacrymas]

This is better than Phoenix Point.

 

[ADL]

I hate Marvel and was disappointed this wasn't XCOM 3 but this is a lot better than people give the game credit for. It's not going in the pantheon of all time greats but it is definitely worth your time for free.

 

[Poseidon00]

So is this game good or not? I liked XCOM:EU and XCOM 2. I don't give a shit about Marvel and comics. As long as the gameplay is good they can put Batman in a pink overall for all I care. What exactly do cards do in this game? Does it play like XCOM or is this some magic the gathering shit? The screenshots and trailers don't exactly make this look like a good turn-based strategy game.

Yes.

 

[Old Hans]

This is better than Phoenix Point.

no way. pheonix point was cool. this marvel super hero game is like an old pile of diapers

 

[RPK]

if you were not too excited about this game but want to try it, it's free on the epic store. not sure when it ends.

 

[sser]

The battles are fun, but the rest of this game is fucking bananas and the game bugs out constantly. Perhaps most confounding though is simply the process to go on a mission.

First, I have to physically run the char to the Mission Select. Then I select the mission. Then it drops me outside in the abbey which can barely load its shaders. Then I run about 50 meters to a portal. Then I run through the portal, enter a hell realm, and run another 30m to ANOTHER portal. THEN the mission starts. Mindboggling. Almost unfathomable in execution.

 

[Grunker]

For all this game’s faults, I don’t think I had a single bug or texture loading issue. I’m on a fairly high end PC tho

 

[sser]

Whenever I enter the abbey my game stutters badly. Usually it'll say "Go talk to so-and-so" and I'll start walking, the game will freeze, then it'll unwind and I'll be teleported into the room as some sort of technical fail-safe. Just walking around is a chore in this manner. Doing shit for Agatha is a chore because of it. When I entered the cave my camera inverted and slowed down like I was using a jammed up controller analog. That was cool.

Also there are weird UI issues, like I was supposed to hit "F" to talk to a person instead of "E", but I hit E first before seeing this and the F prompt never appeared. So I just stood next to this person hitting E, as the game instructed me to talk to them, but this led nowhere except for the usual barks. I then reloaded and slowly walked to them and then the E/F difference appeared. The F part also disappeared upon hitting E again, but activated on the F after that. I've never hit "F" with anyone before or since. What the F.

I've also gotten hardlocked into certain screens, a seemingly common bug if the Steam forums are anything to go by. My entire "abbey" experience is a shitshow from A to Z. The dialogues are frequently painful. I even took Blade out for some "meditation" because I thought they'd shut the fuck up for two seconds but even in meditation they blathered on forever. And Blade is the only one I can even stand at the moment. The others got Joss Whedon injections to turn their personalities into fine, ironic paste. The pace of the game is completely inverted in every way. I have no problem with narrative stuff in a game with comic book heroes, but the abbey content dominates the timeline, even as I escape/left-click through as much as the dialogue as possible. A great deal of dialogue could have been handled in the battles, a la Freedom Force wherein narratively needed quips are inserted while you're fighting, including by characters not in the battle, instead of engaging mechanically with it via a different function entirely.

The combat is smooth as butter, no problems there. The chosen heroes stick out badly because some of them could rip cities in half yet here they are going fisticuffs with random grunts, but whatever.

 

[Lacrymas]

I haven't had such problems. It is buggy though and there's a gamebreaking bug you have to keep in mind. It's when you get the research for the Faithbreaker armor, you have to make sure Captain Marvel isn't on a hero mission because it bugs out and you aren't given any more table missions to progress the days.

 

[Alienman]

Are you using an SSD sser?

 

[sser]

Are you using an SSD sser?

Yeah. Albeit a cheapo one I scraped out of a barrel during the covid years

 

[1451]

Terrible game, I'm glad I didn't buy it.
Fake busywork, a bunch of currencies, ridiculous social aspects and even the core gameplay is bad.
Side missions keep repeating, literally copy pasted, and main story missions put annoying limitations on the player, like having to save civilians while battling.
Overall a failure of colossal proportions, I don't understand how could a publisher fund this.

 

[destinae vomitus]

I don't understand how could a publisher fund this.

It was clearly meant to be a Marvel moneymaking vehicle first and foremost, why wouldn't they fund that seeing as the movies were making bank? All the lootbox and crafting material non-sense was clearly meant to originally be monetized "premium" live service evilness, but the blowback against said crap in recent years likely made them retract that. And the Abbey from what I recall has a bunch of unused rooms i.e. they were aiming to be milking it with more Hero DLCs/season passes or outright expansion packs.

 

[NwNgger]

This is better than Phoenix Point.

I agree but it's not a point in either game's favour. Every game is better than Phoenix Point. It's one of the worst turn based strategy games I've ever played and I've played a lot of them. Midnight Suns is better by the virtue of not being Phoenix Point in the same way Donald Trump is a better US President than Joe Biden by virtue of not being senile and incontinent. It's a low bar. Midnight Sons is still garbage with a gimmicky card system that only exists to be special and different for the sake of it. You could make a Turn Based Strategy Superhero game very fun and thematic. Freedom Force exists. The fuckin Marvel mods for Freedom Force are better than Midnight Sons.

 

[Lacrymas]

This is better than Phoenix Point.

I agree but it's not a point in either game's favour. Every game is better than Phoenix Point. It's one of the worst turn based strategy games I've ever played and I've played a lot of them. Midnight Suns is better by the virtue of not being Phoenix Point in the same way Donald Trump is a better US President than Joe Biden by virtue of not being senile and incontinent. It's a low bar. Midnight Sons is still garbage with a gimmicky card system that only exists to be special and different for the sake of it. You could make a Turn Based Strategy Superhero game very fun and thematic. Freedom Force exists. The fuckin Marvel mods for Freedom Force are better than Midnight Sons.

Midnight Suns is very good for a card game and innovative in a lot of ways. You can't really fault its combat gameplay, everything else is the problem.

 

[gurugeorge]

First impressions: the combat gameplay is kind of neat, compact and fairly addictive. It's got some tactical depth and scope.

I quite like the other parts of the presentation, except while, as an old Marvel fan, I would like to get into the story, I find the characters too tainted by MCU Marvel and its now-tiresome cutesy banter for it to be really enjoyable.

If it was Marvel characters as they were drawn and characterized back in the days when I was still vaguely keeping up with the comics (like the early Noughties, even as recent as the first Iron Man movie), I might actually enjoy the story more. (Like, for example the Runaways was one of the last things I quite enjoyed in the comics, but only like the first, actually half-decent dozen or so issues, and evidently some shit has happened since then that I'm not aware of.)

The end result is that I feel like I'm "in" the Marvel universe only rarely, and that mostly in the combat.