Marvel’s Midnight Suns review: Firaxis assembles its most joyful game to date Leave a comment
The constant mixing and mingling of game genres is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, magic happens, and entire new things are born. DOOM plus Ultima equals Daggerfall, for example. Marvel’s Midnight Suns, the new “tactical role-playing” game from the studio behind XCOM, is an absurd mashup of… almost everything going. And let’s be clear from the outset: it works beautifully.
To be even clearer: I did not expect to love this game. From the trailers, to the marketing, to the extensive 15-minute presentation shown ahead of getting our review code that felt like the kind of XCOM mission briefing you get right before an extremely Not Fun time, Midnight Suns has felt like a project with an identity crisis. It’s a little bit XCOM, but with Slay the Spire’s tactical card battling, the relationship management of Fire Emblem, the choice and consequence HQ politics of Dragon Age and/or Mass Effect, and there’s even a bit of Walking Simulator in there where you mooch about some woods figuring out how to unlock doors while piecing together disparate fragments of plot.
It’s a lot. And I haven’t even mentioned how many currencies there are in this game. Dozens of collectible resources like “skill essence”, “gloss”, or “intel”, which all have specific types of thing that they’re spent on. Arcane keys which unlock the various loot boxes dotted around your headquarters and its environs: The Abbey and its lush, knotted grounds. Basically this game’s equivalent of the SS Normandy except it’s a national heritage site and Iron Man lives there.
