I am looking forward to getting more painting and reading done now that I have finally finished playing Midnight Suns on the PlayStation.
Even though I am still using a past-generation console, I still dislike getting my video games upon release and prefer to pick them up on sale later...often much later. This is why I only finished 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2 last fall, and I also tend to play them kind of exhaustively (all the side missions and anything story-related) whichh is why it took me 11 months to finish.
Midnight Suns is not an open world adventure game like RDR2 though, it is more of a...well, let's just say that to call it a comic-book inspired, turn-based, tactical card RPG wrapped around a dating simulator would not be inaccurate.
Set in the Marvel Comics universe (the original MCU!), the titular Midnight Suns are a group of established, supernaturally oriented characters from a variety of titles: Blade (the vampire hunter), Nico Minoru (the blood witch of The Runaways), Robbie Reyes (the most recent Ghost Rider), and Illyana Rasputin (Magik from the X-Men).
Facing an unprecedented assault from Lilith, the Mother of Demons and her new Hydra allies, they resurrect the last person to defeat her three centuries earlier - her child, known only as The Hunter, which is the character you will play. Such is the level of threat that Avengers Doctor Strange, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel have joined you as well, and the two groups' differing approaches will lead to friction between them at times.
I love turn based games, and having been wanting to play this ever since I found it it was developed by the same crew who made XCOM, and it has been almost exclusively awesome time.
Typical combat encounters feature three characters (some you choose, some chosen for you to fit the story), each of whom as their own deck of 8 cards. On each turn, you can play three, and the order you play them in can be very critical. You can also redraw two cards per turns, franticaly trying to trade your heal card for something more damaging early in the fight, or vice versa later on.
You can also move your characters around the battlefield, which helps you align certain attacks that can hit everything in a straight line, or knock enemies back into obstacles or hazards for addtional damage.
In between missions, you can turn captured 'gamma coils' into random new cards. In addition to newer, different abitlies or attacks, you can also combine two of the same card into an improved version. Eventually you even get the ability to build your own copies of cards or modifying them in other ways.
The role-play aspects occur as you explore the mystical grounds of the Transian abbey that is the headquarters of the Suns, finding various artifacts and eventually the spell ingredients used to create still more resources and items that can be combined in seemingly limited ways. Special challenges enable Hunter to use words of power from the Elder gods, which open up even more of the grounds for exploring.
If I am being honest though, as much as I enjoy the tactical challenges of the combat, what made me love the game is the way it handles downtime. After missions, you are often given the opportunity to 'hangout' with another character, your talk guided by familiar but well-written dialogue trees. You may also have the opportunity to share a gift with them, and finding the right gift for the right individual becomes almost a game unto itself, as does choosing an appropriate activity for the hangout. Glory mocked me mercilessly for taking Wolverine on a picnic later in the game, but it turns out the dude loves some quiet time and chow away from the crowd.
Between these activities, other dialogue opportunities and sparring sessions, you can eventually 'level up' your friendship. Doing this unlocks a few ornamental gewgaws (like wardobe choices for both Hunter and the other hero), but more importantly friendship enables aboslutely brutal hero combo cards that allows two heroes in a fight to combine their attacks. The higher the team;s friendship level, the more of these combos present themselves to you.
Generally good writing and excellent voice acting (Matt Mercer and Laura Bailey from Critical Role as the male voice of Hunter (who can also be female) and Illyana Rasputin), Michael Jai White as Blade) made the story elements most compelling for me - which is why I found the abrupt ending I experienced at 2 am Friday night to be a bit disappointing.
The final fight is a protracted, multi stage affair, without the additional selection and equipping stage I had becoem used to. I also encountered a number of bugs that appear to be kind of commonplace (where the Counter I selected (to aoutomatically attack those who attack me) didn't work on two different occasions) and which at one point told me I had lost the encounter without explaining why. Thankfully the latter only happened once, and online chatter suggests reloading a saved game can mitigate the other glitch, but it still soured me a bit.
Before heading into the final fight, you are given the opportunity to converse with any other character you wish, and knowing it to be the final fight, I of course spoke to all of them. This probably took me twenty minutes, given how large the roster is by game's end, so perhaps this is meant to take the place of an epilogue anyways.Maybe they need some appendices like Lord of The Rings, and I know there's some DLC I will want to try at some point.
Despite these shortcomings, there is an awful lot to like about Midnight Suns: creative, turn-based combat, room for creative combinations and a tremendous variety of things to do, even between missions.
Most critically for me though, is seeing such a well-established universe from such a different perspective. It was touching watching Hunter discover Magik's tragic origin story, a true loss of childhood, as well as seeing him help develop the confidence of Ghost Rider and Spider-Man. Discovering Blade started the Abbey's book club as a means of interacting with his crush, Captain Marvel was fun, as was listening to an embittered Tony Stark refer to the Midnight Suns as the 'spooky teens club.' And the in-game chat board that let's characters converse with each other is worth the price of admission.
And sadly, the game's critical successes but commercial failure works in our favour as it can nowbe found for less than $20 on many platforms; consider checking it out!
