Marvel's Midnight Suns

After about 50 hours, I have finished the main story of Marvel’s Midnight Suns. I really liked this game a lot, it is a weird (in a good way) mix of friendship simulator, tactical RPG, card deck game and Marvel movie. It sounds weird, but once I got into the game loop, it really worked.

The basic game loop spans a single day. The main charater is named The Hunter which I got to customize. The loop starts with Hunter waking up. From there, I would go to The Forge to redeem things with Tony Stark and Doctor Strange.

I’d head out to the Yard to do my daily combat training with a hero of choice – and there are some awesome heroes that spread across multiple Marvel properties (The X-Men, Midnight Suns, Avengers). After that, I’d upgrade or swap out cards from the different hero’s card decks.

I’d go and talk with people and then I head to the table and select a mission to go on. After completing the mission, it’s night time and I would go hang out with a hero to increase my friendship with them – my bestie was Captain Marvel.

Then, it’s sleeping time.

I played the game in “Story” difficulty and the game was just difficult enough to make it challenging without making me feel punished for playing casually or too easy to make it unrewarding.

I played on my Lenovo Legion Pro 5i laptop (Intel i7-13700HX, 16GB RAM and an Nvidia 4070). The game ran okay, but was stuttery around the Abbey. The ray-traced graphics were really impressive.

I played a lot on my Steam Deck and with FSR, it ran decently also at 30-45fps and it looked good. But like with my Lenovo Legion, it was stuttery around the Abbey.

Having said that, the graphics are dazzling, especially during the battles where the game makes the heroes feel powerful and truly like the super heroes they are supposed to be. The characters themselves were good, but stiff. They were stylized just enough to make them look cool.

My favorite heroes in the game were Captain Marvel, Wolverine and Deadpool. When Wolverine joined the team, he and Captain Marvel made a powerful pair. Deadpool, like usual, was hilarious and made the game more funny.

My least favorite character, and the one I avoided talking with, was Nico. She was annoying and grating with her constant moaning and complaining about everything. Her immaturity and brooding made me dread each time I was forced to interact with her.

There were two things that the game had too much of: Currency and dialogue. While I enjoy some good dialogue, the dialogue in Marvel’s Midnight Suns was iffy at points. Plus, most characters drone on and on at times. Yes, it was nice that they told me their backstories and gave context to their characters. I liked learning about Marvel characters that I hadn’t read before.

The currency in the game include things like Gloss (for buying cosmetics), Credits (for buying non-cosemetic things), Essense (for card upgrades), Blueprints (also for card upgrades), Intel (for Hero Ops), Reagents (I didn’t bother). I think there are others too, but I didn’t bother. It was an overwhelming amount of different currency and I think Firaxis may have gone overboard with it.

I really enjoyed the game, I finished the main story and Deadpool’s DLC story during my 50 hours. I have a couple of DLC stories to finish (Storm, Venom and Morbius), but I will take my time working through those later.

In the middle of the year, I picked up a Steam Deck and returned back to playing games on PC after years of only gaming on consoles. In October, I started playing Midnight Suns while on a business trip in Bellevue, WA on my Steam Deck.