The Awful Middle Ground of ‘Marvels Midnight Suns’ (2024)

The Awful Middle Ground of ‘Marvels MidnightSuns’

For all their success in publishing, cinema and television in recent decades, it’s odd that the virtual realm is one that Marvel has not conquered. When challenged to come up with the best Marvel games, fans will fan back on arcade favourites such as six player X-Men and Marvel VS Capcom 2. Whilst the occasional hit slips through, such as Spider-Man on the Playstation, the standard has been around the level of Square’s The Avengers, a grindathon loot-box slog populated by the character’s understudy.

This looked to be turned around by Marvel’s Midnight Suns, a tactical combat based game focusing on the darker heroes in the Marvel Comic line. The titular team consists of such edgy fare as Blade, Nico and Ghost Rider. What drew my attention was the inclusion of lesser known X-Men legend Magik being a playable character. The real sell was Firaxis Games, however, this studio being a major player in the field of turn-based strategy. XCOM, a significant entry in their portfolio, was the perfect foundation upon which to build a Marvel themed take on the concept.

All these seemed to be coming up golden. Lesser used but beloved characters, and the XCOM people building the whole thing, and a massive marketing campaign. The chance to score more characters with DLC, such as Storm, Venom and Deadpool, hinted at more to come. Critic scores were coming in hot, with the deck-building combat mechanics making these a well received title.

Not that all of these automatically translates into sales. Midnight Suns landed with an unexpectedly poor public reception. Little buzz and even fewer sales. Due to this, we didn’t get our hands on it until the title arrived on the PS+ subscription service, at which point we decided it was time to find out what went wrong with a gothic Marvel combat strategy game from Firaxis. It certainly didn’t take long to find out the problems, and it’s very clear how this happened. In short, there are to many people with a vested interest in this project from license holders to marketing departments to producers. There is a solid gold core to this game, but it’s buried under layers of pointless fluff.

There are two major components to Midnight Suns – the combat, and the time spent at the Abbey in between missions. The combat missions themselves are fantastic, and were fun enough to push past all the rigmarole of the Abbey and finish the full story. After selected a small team of heroes from the stable available, you turn up in an arena-like space to face off against a group of foes. Each round you draw cards from your pre-planned decks, and play them to activate the hero abilities. You can link attacks together, use them to place your heroes or opponents in key locations and make use of the objects in the area. Kicking a sofa across the room and demolishing it against a demon. Each round concludes with a batch of one-hit-kill minions joining the fight, so you’ve always got someone to punch through a portal and off a cliff.

Once the mission is complete, it’s time to visit the Abbey. The main thrust of the plot is that an ancient magical fighter called Hunter is resurrected by the Midnight Suns. You take control of Hunter and move into the Abbey along with the main cast. The aforementioned mystical folks are here, along with Dr. Strange, and a few faces who represent the marketing interests of the production company. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America and Captain Marvel decide to move into the Abbey, kicking off a slumber party of angsty superheroes. At this point of the game we were introduced to the Friendship meter.

Each of my new roommates comes equipped with a number representing your friendship with them. To get introduced to the mechanic, I was invited to participate in movie night with the Blood-Magic using member of The Runaways Nico. Even when your not on a specific friendship activity, you can still stop and chat with the ever increasing cast of characters. They will stand stiffly in front of you and dump massive amounts of information about their back stories, strengths and weaknesses, friends and loved ones, range of powers, blood type and favourite pizza topping. Your responses must be considered as it will affect both your friendship levels with your responses.

At this point, you suspect that a Cosy Village simulator ala Animal Crossing has been snuck into this military style tactical combat game about dark magic. This impression is deepened by Blade, vampire hunter, Daywalker, psychopath, inviting me to go fishing in a nearby creek where he divulged his crush on Captain Marvel and asked for my help in getting her to notice him. Later, while walking the grounds and collecting random objects and one of the seven currencies used for upgrades, we found a lovely spot for landscape painting and invited Magik to do some art together and talk about our feelings.

With the many friendship tasks to keep on top off, which is soon expanded to include a gift buying mechanic where you have to match the right gift to the right hero…is the ‘Classic Roasted Beef Jerky’ better for Wolverine or Captain America? Anyway, there’s also at least three different locations you have to visit on each day in the Abbey to upgrade your gadgets, cards, stats, etc. It isn’t long before each pause between combat missions involves running a lap of this location, checking each and every stop, and power mashing the skip dialogue button. We can’t emphasise enough how long every conversation goes for. The script for dialogue is on par with Metal Gear Solid 4.

But wait, there’s more.

At some point the superheroes begin inviting the resurrected magical demon hunter who has to kill his evil goddess mother to their social clubs. Yes, in addition to repeatedly striking up conversations, participating in ‘hang outs’ and doing fun activities, and helping the heroes solve their moral dilemmas, you’re expected to dedicate even more of this tactical combat game’s runtime to the Social Clubs for stiff, inhuman looking figures. The weird kids want you to attend their ‘Emo Kids’ club, Spider-Man, Ghostrider and Iron Man have a mechanics club, and Blade recruits who and Captain Marvel to start a Book Club. You have extended dialogue blocks based around your favourite Marvel characters stoically breaking down a series of books.

Each of these clubs comes with a series of tasks involving wondering the Abbey grounds and looking for various pick-ups. Mushrooms and herbs are a common one. The grounds are split into different sections, with upgrades being needed to unlock the abilities to grant access. As mentioned before, there are numerous currencies in the game, usually represented by a glowing dot that appears from time to time. Different upgrades require different currencies, so you have to complete a lap of the area in between each mission in order to continue making progress through the story. You will find that quite often completing a friendship task will end with unlocking a new swimsuit for when the character relaxes by the pool.

There are two things that may occur at this point. Firstly, didn’t these between mission sections appear in every game of the genre, and why am I so stuck on this point. The answer the second question first – because the game made me spent what felt like hours skipping through cut scenes and button mashing past the dialogue dumps. Even if you’re skimming as lightly as possible, it’s a huge amount to wade through before continuing the game. Now while XCOM and similar games do always have these between mission upgrade sections, you can usually click through them. You don’t have to pilot your avatar character through a large location and play house with 20 superheroes who want to dump 80 years of comic continuity onto the player.

This boils down to the distinct impression that a number of invested parties wanted different things in this Triple-A title. Obviously there’s an audience for Marvel content, and an audience for the Firaxis games. The math is simple. This game design and this fictional world is a good mesh. But then there’s a gap in the market for people who want to role-play as a member of The Avengers, and hang out with their favourites, and unlock new costumes for them. Although these are two very different audiences, some bright spark felt that forcing one audience to play through another audience’s game in between sections of their game with please everybody. The reality is that when I want to go fishing with fictional characters I can play Dreamlight Valley, and when I want to carefully work out the right position to place a warrior so they can inflict maximum harm before succumbing to the odds, I’d play XCOM. Never have I wanted to flit back and forth between these two games.

If you want to invest hours into perfecting the combat mechanics, manage your stats and put together the most effective deck of cards for you team possible, you can. but not without endless explanations of Tony Stark’s personally history copied from the Wikipedia page. Even if you want to involve yourself in the role-play, you’ve got two major hurdles. The most glaring is the fact that the Abbey character models are the same as the combat zone ones, designed to be viewed from a birds perspective high above the action. When you get right down close to them to share your feelings over a coffee they look they wooden mannequins with wigs glued on.

A bigger hurdle is the playable character of Hunter. Although you get given plenty of customisation options in their appearance, this is style an established character with a backstory, relationships with the major players and their own motivation. It’s difficult to role play as a member of the squad when you’ve got such little control over who you are.

The success of a game is measured in sales, and this is where is failed to win people over. A dark Marvel tactical combat game will sell. A cozy little life simulator with Marvel characters will sell. Few people are looking for the two experiences jammed together. By the end of the story we had long stopped keeping track of the plot, and were rushing through the Abbey sequences as quickly as possible, leaving a bit of a bad taste despite how tightly designed the main aspect of the game was.

Just release the combat, and you’ve got a damn near perfect game.