The story of Marvel's Midnight Suns is clearly inspired by the original 1990s Rise of the Midnight Sons comic book series in which Blade, Morbius, and Ghost Rider, among others, team up to battle a recently resurrected Lilith and her army. of demons. . However, the title from developer Firaxis Games incorporates more faces from the current Midnight Suns series, such as Wolverine, Magik, and Nico Minoru. By making these changes, he distances himself from the idea in the source material that in order to defeat a monster, you need a team of monsters. Instead, it's a story about the power of friendship among a group of misfits, forged and strengthened through battle just as much as in traditional social settings. Midnight Suns aims to combine relationship building with memorable role-playing moments, and the result is a stellar turn-based tactical combat title driven by interesting characters.
Marvel's Midnight Suns begins with the Avengers in a sticky situation: the prophesied return of a supernatural god is on the horizon, brought about by Lilith, who now leads an army of HYDRA soldiers and demonic children in a war against humanity. The Avengers aren't adequately prepared to deal with such a supernatural threat, so they turn to Doctor Strange and his new apprentice, the Scarlet Witch, for help. After his first attempt to fight Lilith fails, Strange presents the contingency plan to the world's mightiest heroes: the Midnight Suns, a group of young heroes who wield magical, supernatural, or demonic powers.
Directors: Chad Rocco, Jacob Solomon
Writers: Zach Bush, Scott Wittbecker, Patrick Kevin Day
Stars: Elizabeth Grullon, Matthew Mercer, Rick Pasqualone
That's where your character, The Hunter, comes in. As the son of Lilith, you possess incredible magical abilities, which is what helped you defeat her 300 years ago. That final duel left you and Lilith dead, but just as HYDRA managed to bring your mother back to life, the Midnight Suns can do the same for you. Not content with leaving the fate of the world in the hands of others, the Avengers also decide to take up residence in the Midnight Suns' headquarters, The Abbey, to join the fight against Lilith.
The main conflict in Marvel's Midnight Suns is explored through the tried-and-true formula of "What happens when the old guard meets the new?" In Marvel's Midnight Suns, the Avengers have already bested Ultron, Galactus, Thanos, and other potential apocalypses, so they're not particularly eager for input from a newly formed team of much younger heroes. And the Midnight Suns believe the Avengers are a huge waste of space for the mission at hand, as the larger team isn't prepared to take on a magical threat with the science they've relied on for decades.
Marvel's Midnight Suns doesn't add anything new with this kind of storyline, but it creates plenty of interesting moments throughout its 45-hour run. Heroes like Iron Man and Captain America find solace in their struggles with their figurative demons from the perspective of those who have dealt with literal demons their entire lives. What does it look like when Tony Stark, who is fully aware of his alcoholism and believes that he has accepted all the bad life decisions he has made through the good he has accomplished as Iron Man, meets Robbie Reyes, a directly affected Ghost Rider? For the sins of Stark Industries that Tony has deliberately ignored? These are the kinds of questions that Marvel's Midnight Suns asks and answers, and the stories are often intriguing, if a bit understated.
A nicer complexity is found in the combat missions the team embarks on to fight Lilith and her army. Each mission is structured around a turn-based tactical combat system in which you command your characters' positioning, attacks, and defenses before the enemy attacks you, and then respond in turn. Firaxis Games' work on the XCOM series is heavily represented here, with Marvel's Midnight Suns trading soldiers and aliens for superheroes and demons. However, it's not exactly one-to-one replication. Unlike XCOM, character attacks and abilities always hit their mark - there's no way for an enemy to reduce the chance you'll hit them. This ensures that the superheroes you're playing always feel as powerful as they're portrayed in other media and that, within the reach of a single turn, your actions will play out the way you want them to.
Eliminating XCOM's frustrating percentage system, which could cause even the best-planned strategies to fail inexplicably, makes turn-based tactical combat in Marvel's Midnight Suns much more fun. It's gratifying to see a plan come to fruition as planned. In its place is a deckbuilding card system, ensuring that even if each individual turn goes as planned, you won't know what you'll be able to do on your next turn until you start and draw your hand. In this way, there is still an element of challenging randomness in each encounter, which encourages you to think strategically in each mission, but it is used to test your ability to think and plan as you go. That's so much better than having to rely on an invisible dice roll that can mess you up and somehow cause you not to shoot a bad guy two feet away because the hit percentage was only 98% and you just had bad luck.
There is one exception to using invisible dice rolls and that is to knock enemies off the map, either over the side of a skyscraper or into one of Ghost Rider's pits of hell. If you try to take an enemy off the map, the game will inform you of the percentage chance of that happening. I can understand the intent, as successfully removing an enemy from the map counts as an instant knockout, so giving players a way to bog down difficult encounters would have been too much. Instead, this part of the game acts as a last-ditch lifeline. If you've got your back against the wall, you might be able to clear the field a bit with some lucky pushes, but if you want a sure thing, it's best to strategize with the cards you've been dealt and trust your heroes. skills.
And Marvel's Midnight Suns gives you a strong lineup of heroes right off the bat, giving you new faces (and more cards for the existing roster) at regular intervals - your available strategies constantly evolve, and no character feels useless if you don't. I want to experience Each character fills a different role: Captain Marvel cards allow her to build shields and taunt enemies with powerful bionic attacks like an awesome tank, for example. Ghost Rider, for his part, is a risky DPS with many attacks that damage both enemies and himself, but he also has cards that allow him to replenish the health of enemies he defeats. The missions also have a variety of structures: you may be tasked with saving civilians while holding off enemy attacks, or you may be told to destroy wave after wave of enemies increasing in strength. Between the different types of quests and numerous characters (all of whom possess dozens of cards that you can put in or out of your deck, upgrade, or modify), Marvel's Midnight Suns doesn't get repetitive.
Each character can only bring one deck of 10 cards into battle. This makes each individual character deck small enough to handle but big enough to branch out with a few different strategies so you can better suit the mission. Some cards allow you to generate heroism, which can be spent to play powerful hero cards. Cards can be upgraded to deal more damage or modified with different effects, allowing for even more customization. One of the best secondary effects a card can have is knockback, which allows you to push back an enemy. That can be used to slam one enemy into another, damaging both, or to send an enemy into an environmental hazard like an explosive container or fuse box. Certain parts of each environment can also be used by spending heroism: a loose rock can be thrown, for example, or a stack of hanging crates can be dropped on a group of unsuspecting enemies. There are a ton of options in how you use your cards and the battlefield to your advantage, with dozens of possible combinations and setups based on who you quest and what cards you have in their deck.
The game does a great job of making sure you switch things up too. Heroes can get hurt if they take too much damage in one mission or sustain repeated injuries in multiple missions in a row, which means it's best to constantly rotate who you bring to the next operation. And even if you don't and just want to fight who you like, an auto-leveling system ensures that heroes you don't use as often are never too far behind.
Watch Midnight Suns 2022 Video Game Trailer
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