One of my favorite things about watching superheroes duke it out is when someone gets smacked so hard they fly backwards and crash through solid walls, explode tanker trucks, or slam into their friends. It’s an awesome demonstration of just how strong these godlike characters are supposed to be, and it’s always a disappointment when a superhero game doesn’t quite capture that feeling. With Marvel’s Midnight Suns, however, Firaxis has built a deep and innovative turn-based tactical combat system around the joy of having Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Blade, and more knock enemies around like toys they're trying to break – and that hasn’t gotten old in the roughly 75 hours of its surprisingly expansive RPG campaign. A lot of that time isn’t spent in battles, though, and while it’s certainly appealing to get up close and personal with this cast of more than a dozen popular and lesser-known Marvel heroes, it does tend to go a bit overboard with convincing Earth’s mightiest heroes to all be your BFFs.
The full-on supernatural theme of Midnight Suns immediately sets it apart from the Marvel games we’ve gotten in recent years. This story is very loosely based on the Marvel Comics series Midnight Sons, and centers on the corrupt witch Lilith returning from the dead to claim the Darkhold (the evil spell book featured in Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness) on behalf of an even more evil god. That apocalyptic mystical threat isn’t terribly novel in of itself, but the family relationships around it make it more interesting: Lilith is the mother of our character, a Commander Shepard-style blank slate known as The Hunter, and her sister is Caretaker, a powerful witch who serves as the Midnight Sun’s Professor X-like mentor. There’s a lot of history between them to delve into – literally, in that Lilith and Caretaker are hundreds of years old and date back to the Salem Witch Trials – and the story uses Lilith’s ability to twist the minds of heroes and villains alike to great effect in creating strife and division among our heroes. With such a long campaign – at least 60 hours, but I’m at more like 75 or 80 now – just about everybody in the cast gets some time to shine, from the world-famous Spider-Man to the more obscure magical heroes like the Runaways’ Nico Minaru and Colossus’ sister Illyana “Magik” Rasputin, who both take central roles in the fight against Lilith.
Right off the bat, Midnight Suns’ style of combat is radically and refreshingly different from Firaxis’ genre-defining XCOM games. For one thing, each member of your three-person team you take on a typical mission has their own customizable deck of eight cards representing everything from Spider-Man’s THWIP!!! web-stunning attack to Dr. Strange’s Winds of Watoomb tornado, forcing you to think on your feet in order to make the best possible use of the hand you’re dealt. As a big fan of card games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train (and recently Marvel Snap) I’m absolutely on board with this idea – the unpredictability of it keeps me from falling into the rut of repeating the same routine every battle once I find something effective. Having just a few cards in your hand isn’t as limiting as you might think, since you can discard and redraw any at least a few every turn to replace those that aren’t useful in your situation (and you can increase the number of redraws per turn with consumable items or card upgrades). It’s rare that I’ve found myself unable to act, and it’s not unusual that you’ll draw exactly the card you want.
Another excellent aspect of this system is that all your characters draw from the same pool of (usually) three “card plays” and one movement action per turn. That means that one person getting knocked out doesn’t instantly reduce your available actions by a third – you lose access to that hero’s cards, but those who are left standing can still use all of the turn’s allotted moves. So you’re at a disadvantage until you can revive them, but it’s not so great that you’re pulled into the downward spiral of failure that can happen in XCOM and other squad-based games – but it certainly doesn’t mean Midnight Suns is easy.
Superheroes don’t take cover in a fight and they don’t miss their shots, so instead of getting entrenched and using suppressive fire to win shootouts, these mostly small-scale missions are exciting slugfests where staying alive is all about quickly taking enemies out – or at least weakening them before they get to move. Directing their attacks away from your weakest hero with taunts and buffing your allies with armor and resistances is key to mitigating the damage, and a lot of the guesswork is taken out of it by icons above enemies' heads indicating who they plan to attack on their turn.
The rhythm of combat involves picking off weak fodder enemies using basic attack and skill cards (those with the “quick” trait refund your card play if you knock out a target, extending your turn) to build up Heroism points, which can then be spent on powerful Heroic cards like a hail of missiles from Iron Man’s shoulders that damages every enemy on the screen or Wolverine's armor-piercing claws, or satisfying environmental attacks like dropping a street lamp on a group of enemies or vaulting off a table to come crashing down on a target from above. It’s fantastic when it all comes together to let you clear out one of these close-quarters arena maps before the inevitable wave of enemy reinforcements charges in from off-screen to keep the action going.
Firaxis’ animators have done an excellent job of making these turn-based fights feel energetic. That so much of it is built around smacking enemies with extreme force works extremely well with high-powered heroes like Iron Man and Captain Marvel, and using Spider-Man’s webs to fling objects into bad guys’ faces from across the map is very on-brand. With all of that knockback in play positioning is extremely important – you have to think about how to approach a target and how to set up more damaging hits. On that note, I love how every hero has a distinctive flavor to the way they move and attack, whether it’s flying, levitating, teleporting, or swinging, and the powerful team-up attacks put on a good show as two heroes take turns beating the living hell out of a target. When you scale up to the over-the-top late-game abilities the animations are a whole lot of fun to watch, and it's all set to a rousing Avengers-esque score.
Mixing heroes like Magik and Ghost Rider into your squad gives you the ability to open portals in the floor (into Limbo and/or Hell) and kick enemies into it for an instant knockout, which is one of the few major places in Midnight Suns where a roll of the dice determines if an attack is successful or not. Considering this requires you to spend a move and may not do any damage at all, it’s a gamble – but it can pay off big if you can remove a beefy enemy from the map in one move.
While the maps you do battle on are consistently small and flat with only a handful of objects on them for you to slam enemies with or into, there are a fair number of backdrops to keep visual diversity up and a good variety of objectives beyond simply defeating all the enemies. There are hazards that make you keep your squad moving to avoid danger zones, shield-bearing enemies that have to be broken through to reach a target, Hydra VIPs that must be captured, bombs that must be disabled, and so on. You can also keep things interesting on straightforward battles by opting into side objectives where you need to, for example, use a specific character to deal 250 damage within two turns. Between those factors and occasional boss encounters with Venom, Sabertooth, Crossbones, and more – each with their own unique mechanics – missions rarely felt like I was stuck in a loop.
Of course, Midnight Suns’ combat does have some annoying quirks to get used to: because positioning is so important it's a bit frustrating that you can’t really control where your characters will land after an attack (though it does preview the location for you before you play a card), and because there’s no grid it can be a pain to find the exact right place to cast an area-of-effect attack to hit multiple targets or to get an environmental attack to line up just right. The main thing that still throws me off, though, is that it’s easy to accidentally move a character when you’re trying to make them shove an enemy, and once you do that you've burnt that shove move for this turn.