XMAN: Enemy Undead - Marvel's Midnight Suns

[MCBanjoMike]

Folks, we are a scant few days away from the release of Firaxis' next big strategy game and I do not know how to feel about it. As you may already know, I am a huge XCOM nerd, with hundreds of hours in both Enemy Within and War of the Chosen under my belt. But as much as I love the games this team has created, I'm a little torn between excitement and dread, since there are some pretty major changes in this upcoming game. First off, this won't be XCOM with super heroes - apparently they tried that, and it was super boring. Instead, we're looking at a game with character-specific decks of cards that then seemingly all get shuffled together and offered up to the player somewhat randomly. There's also a pretty big social component to the game, as your custom character gets to know a large crew of Marvel heroes via social events at your home base between missions. I'm hearing comparisons to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, if that gives you an idea.

But mostly, if I'm being honest, I'm not super enthused about the Marvel connection. I'm not a hater of the MCU, but things wrapped up so neatly in Endgame that I don't feel especially compelled to return to that universe these days. Though to be fair, I think this game is based on the comics, rather than the MCU itself. I'm also a bit skeptical because of just how much writing this game apparently has. As a huge fan of WotC, I can tell you that the writing was more or less the worst part of that game. It's possible that they got some other writers in, because there's way more dialogue in this than in anything they've made previously, but for now it's a bit on an X factor.

That said, I'm not sure I can see myself skipping the next game by the XCOM team. So watch this space, I guess, and we'll see if I cave on launch day!

Yeah OK, I mostly posted this as an excuse to use the thread title.

 

[WildcatJF]

I'm hopeful this will turn out well. I love XCOM via Firaxis and I like the MCU enough to be invested in the premise, but I will admit the card system has me a little nervous. Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together, tho.

 

[JBear]

I was really excited about this, but it looks like this is neither the game I wanted nor the game I expected. Also, I hear it's laser-targeted at big comics nerds (with a bunch of deep cuts), which definitely does not describe me. So, I'm probably going to push it quite a bit further down my wishlist/queue. That said, different doesn't mean bad! I have a lot of faith in this developer, so I'm hoping to find something fun and novel here.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I was really excited about this, but it looks like this is neither the game I wanted nor the game I expected. Also, I hear it's laser-targeted at big comics nerds (with a bunch of deep cuts), which definitely does not describe me. So, I'm probably going to push it quite a bit further down my wishlist/queue. That said, different doesn't mean bad! I have a lot of faith in this developer, so I'm hoping to find something fun and novel here.

I'm not huge comics nerd either, but I'd rather they take a deep-cut story like this than make something movie-adjacent. And I agree with you that there are a lot of reasons to give Firaxis the benefit of the doubt, so right now I'm leaning towards playing this. I'll probably wait for a few reviews before spending any money, though. On the bright side, I was listening to the interview with Jake Solomon that Waypoint did earlier this week and apparently they really did get help with the script writing from other teams at 2K. That's reassuring to me, considering just how story-heavy this game appears to be.

 

[ShakeWell]

Turn-based strategy is generally a turn-off for me, but superheroes and deck-building is enough to at least get me to want to check it out. It has Blade! And Ghost Rider! And Wolverine! I don't know if this ends up being a team-based Fights in Tight Spaces or what, but like I said, my interest is piqued.

 

[estragon]

The Waypoint interview mentioned earlier in this thread was really interesting, and I definitely recommend to anyone who wants to hear about the develop process of this game.

I hear it's laser-targeted at big comics nerds (with a bunch of deep cuts

As they described it (and maybe you'll pulling from this save interview, but I wanted to add some context), the idea was that they didn't want to create the expectation that it would be an MCU game, so they went with an adaptation of a story from the 90s that isn't super well known to not give anyone the wrong idea and create a distinct identity. But in practice over the past 5 years many of their "deep cuts" became household names, so it should be more accessible to people whose main exposure is the movies (or other adaptations) by this point in time.

When they started making this, they never could have expected Agatha Harkness of all characters would become the most viral moment out of probably everything that's came out of the MCU TV shows, for example.

I will admit the card system has me a little nervous.

They also talk about this in the interview, and as I remember it basically the original pitch was X-COM with superheroes, but in practice it felt really bad and wrong to have Iron Man or Captain Marvel feel as fragile as X-COM characters, so (inspired by Slay the Spire) they tried cards as a way to balance access to various abilities while maintaining the core character fantasy.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

practice over the past 5 years many of their "deep cuts" became household names

C'mooooooon, Sleepwalker.

 

[Octopus Prime]

“Full of deep cuts for comic nerds” is such a selling point for me you have no idea.

…you probably have a very good idea. I made a dedicated thread to reading Thunderbolts.

That being said; I’m both waiting for the Switch port, and waiting to see how that port compares to the others before I get excited.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Give me a game with this...

 

[lincolnic]

First review (that I've seen) is very positive!

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Rob Zacny (whom I trust implicitly with this sort of thing) was a little more moderate in his praise, but still generally positive toward the game. It's possible that I'll crack and buy it, but with such a heavy emphasis on story, I might end up waiting for the first sale before I do. We'll see how December goes, I guess.

 

[estragon]

In that review and on the podcast Rob has been comparing its heavy emphasis on social elements between battles and relatively easy combat balance to Fire Emblem: Three Houses, rather than first impression it gives of being Marvel X-COM. In the review he concludes that this gets the balance a little better than FE:3H because combat never becomes quite that trivial. I don't think I want a version of FE:3H starring this set of characters, but I can imagine that would be appealing to a lot of people (including many on this forum) and I can see why they went in that direction.

 

[Falselogic]

I read somewhere else that it was something akin to Persona, rather than FE. But, I don't know if that is a distinction with much of a difference, not having played it yet.

I know I would prefer it if it was more like Persona than FE, but that is just me.

 

[estragon]

I read somewhere else that it was something akin to Persona, rather than FE. But, I don't know if that is a distinction with much of a difference, not having played it yet.

Yeah when Rob Zacny says it's like FE:3H, he specifically means the walk around the abbey and talk to your friends segments, which are similar to (maybe even consciously modeled after) Persona 3-5's walk around and talk to your friends segments, so I don't think this is a meaningful distinction. Basically: It does the thing in Persona 3-5 and FE:3H where a lot of the game is about walking around your home base and talking to your party members. Rob specifically is making the FE:3H analogy because it's a strategy game rather than JRPG, and also because the combat in those strategy segments is not as difficult as people might expect from an X-COM style game.

 

[ShakeWell]

Those are the parts of Persona that I hate, which dampens my enthusiasm for this significantly. (Though chatting with Avengers sounds more interesting to me than chatting with Japanese teens at kendo club or whatever.)

 

[MCBanjoMike]

So I guess I should probably mention that I bought this game two weeks ago and have played whole a bunch of it since then. I have a strange relationship Midnight Suns, in that I don't find any part of it particularly great, but I just keep coming back and playing for (by my standards) pretty lengthy sessions. It combines the "one more turn" of XCOM with the "one more day" of Persona, in a way that makes it super easy to go an hour longer than you were planning to, split up into 30-second activities. Ooh, I just got a new card, time to tweak my deck! Oh wait, I freed up a copy of this attack card, now I should go upgrade it. Hang on, Blade is in the living room and he wants to talk with me? And before you know it, it's the start of another in-game day and hey, time to see what I can upgrade at the forge!

Underpinning all this is two OK tastes that taste pretty good together. You probably spend 3/4 of your time in the abbey and 1/4 in battles, but that abbey time isn't exclusively social in nature. You'll also use it to manage your decks and resources, build upgrades and even explore the grounds, which are surprisingly vast. Admittedly, the game doles out its mechanics pretty slowly, so at first you won't have all that much to do outside of schmooze with the various heroes. But now that I'm 15 or so hours in, I'm starting to have more granular control over the cards and decks at my disposal. I was definitely finding things kind of dull at first, when your options are purely limited to which characters you take on missions, but I'm at the point where I can start really thinking about their individuals builds. So that's nice, but the ramp-up to get here was preeeeetty slow IMO.

The card combat is fun, albeit not super deep just yet. A lot of it comes down to positioning, and using attacks that push enemies around for crowd control. Enemies comes in two primary flavors: mooks that will die to literally anything, and more burly troops with proper HP bars and varied abilities. You're generally limited to 3 card plays per turn, but some cards are free and others will become free if certain conditions are met (most frequently, you killed an enemy with the attack). Cards also either generate or use heroism points, so there's a balancing act in figuring out how to play enough cards to eventually use a more powerful attack later in the turn - although your heroism carries over if you don't spend it. There are also environmental hazards scattered throughout the combat arenas that you can typically use to do damage or stun enemies, at the cost of hero points (but without using your precious card plays). It's a fine system, but at this point in the game it doesn't feel like it fosters a lot of synergies. Mostly, I'm just running the numbers game, trying to take out low-HP enemies without running out of card plays before they can hurt my heroes. But I can see that my decks are getting more diverse as I acquire new abilities and I bet there will be some fun strategies to deploy in the late-game. Again, you've gotta be pretty patient with the game to make it that far.

The other thing you'll have to be patient with is talking, because boy oh boy is there a lot of talking in this game. I went in with low expectations, but it turns out that the majority of the writing is at least OK, and sometimes it actually crosses the barrier into "good". What does NOT ever get good, unfortunately, are the faces. You spend a whole lot of time looking at these characters talk, and it's honestly pretty off-putting how stilted and awkward these conversations are, visually speaking. I know you can't hand-animate 50 hours' worth of conversations in a game this size, but this feels a lot closer to Mass Effect than Witcher 3. On the Nextlander podcast, they said the characters look sort of like Sims and...yeah, I can see it. Thankfully, the voice acting is pretty good, so I've found myself liking some of the characters despite the dead eyes and awkward body language. Not ALL of them, mind you, some of the heroes can be pretty bland...notably, your player-created character, who tends to be extremely serious most of the time. I suppose it fits with their history, but it's still a weird choice to make the character who gets the most screen time be so flat, almost monotone. I went with the female voice, echoes of all that Mass Effect I played 10 years ago, but maybe the male voice is better?

Anyway, overall I'm kind of surprised how much I want to play this game, despite the fact that none of its parts is especially compelling. It helps that it's been getting better over time, on the tactics front but also in my attachment to the various characters. Has anyone else given this a try? Got any thoughts to share?

 

[Violentvixen]

It combines the "one more turn" of XCOM with the "one more day" of Persona

Oh no.

The playstyle just doesn't look like something I'd enjoy so dunno if I'll get this but I am definitely curious about it. My PC definitely can't handle it so I'd be playing it on Xbox and am hoping it shows up on Gamepass sometime.

 

[lincolnic]

Oh hey, I beat this over the holidays and have been meaning to write pretty much the same post that Mike wrote. Midnight Suns is a weird game, but it's got a lot of heart and I found it very hard to put down for the exact same reasons Mike listed in his first paragraph.

It's a fine system, but at this point in the game it doesn't feel like it fosters a lot of synergies.

I think you're juuuust reaching the point in the game where the training wheels start to come off. All the synergies come from how the different characters interact with and support each other, as well as from new cards you unlock. If you haven't seen it already, in the Heroes tab in the menu, if you go over to the character profiles and push whatever button it is that opens the extra info there (sorry I can't remember the specific terminology here, it's been a couple of weeks), the game actually does a pretty good job of explaining the strengths of each particular character and what kind of team makeup they're suited for.

One thing I do want to mention is that I was really pleasantly surprised by how mechanically distinct all of the characters are. Everyone feels unique, which adds a nice layer of depth to the missions.

I will disagree with Mike about the writing, though. I think most of the time it's bad, occasionally rising to good (typically for one-on-one character interactions). I felt like the voice actors -- who are generally very good, the cast is pretty impressive -- frequently have to do their best to salvage the awkward dialogue. It feels like they didn't always receive great direction either. I'll give the writers credit because they clearly love the material they're working with, and slip in a lot of references to individual stories and plot moments from decades of comics. But it feels like they didn't know how to deal with the amount of dialogue they were expected to write, so overall it suffers. And yeah, the Hunter (your character) is probably the worst of all. They just feel stilted, and not in the clearly intended "this character has been dead for 300 years and is learning about the world again" way. Some of this is a failure in direction rather than writing (someone had to tell the actor to perform that way for however long it took to record all their dialogue), but I wish they'd put a bit more care into the self-insert main character.

And the graphics are, indeed, Very Bad. It spends a lot of time looking like a PS3 game. I'm by no means a graphics-first person, but playing on PS5, it was jarring even to me. Though it's probably worth noting that this is mostly during the Abbey parts of the game; the combat gameplay looks a fair bit better.

I don't want to come off as all negative though, because I really did enjoy the combat/deckbuilding half of the game a lot. I played this game pretty consistently for the week or two it took me to roll the credits and don't regret it at all. I even got everyone up to the maximum friendship levels! I saw a review somewhere that said the game felt like a really ambitious game from, like, 2005, when developers were still able to just try smashing two weird ideas together. And that's not a bad thing! There's a lot to like here, but it helps to be aware of the game's faults before you start.

Also, not only can you pet the dog, you're continually rewarded for doing so. A+, 10/10.

 

[Torzelbaum]

But is it Lockjaw or a different dog?

 

[lincolnic]

Different dog. I think she might be original to this game.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I will disagree with Mike about the writing, though. I think most of the time it's bad, occasionally rising to good (typically for one-on-one character interactions).

This might also just be a case of expectation management - I had heard from a few sources that the writing was bad before I started playing, so I think it didn't have a hard time clearing the bar I had for it. It definitely feels overly-wordy, like they knew they needed a lot of dialogue, wrote a ton and then were too scared to pare it down. But I agree that the one-on-one conversations tend to be pretty alright, and the rest of time I'm usually not grinding my teeth (although I do occasionally reach for the "skip to next line" button).

I actually kind of want to shout out the guy they got to do Tony Stark, because those are big shoes to fill and he does a pretty decent job. It doesn't sound like he's trying to imitate Downey's voice, but he does copy the cadence of speech really well, which is a good middle ground IMO. He also tends to have the funniest lines in the game, at least so far.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Different dog. I think she might be original to this game.

Original Dog, Do Not Steal.

But it's OK to pet.

 

[Mogri]

I read a review like this once, centuries ago.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I read a review like this once, centuries ago.

That is...something.

 

[lincolnic]

That is...something.

Were these posts always here?

 

[Eishtmo]

I've been watching an old comic book fan playing it for a bit, and he seems to enjoy it, and he's often hard to please. I almost want to get it myself, but I also have no money at the moment so. . .

 

[ASandoval]

Been meaning to write about this game for a while. In short, I liked it a lot, but I should also note I'm bias because a good friend worked on the game, so keep that in mind.

For one, I'm not really one for card games and especially deck builders, so I was surprised how engaging the game was for me. I still didn't like fussing with cards to perfect my deck, but the actual battles were breezy, fun and just the right amount of strategy for me, which is to say I could hold my own and generally get through all the battles even when things didn't go my way whereas when I finished some encounters in only a couple of turns, it felt really good. Probably my biggest frustration was the randomness, where I just would not get cards that were useful for many turns, no matter how good my deck was set up.

I'll also say while I agree the writing is perfunctory at best, it was a breath of fresh air for someone like me who doesn't read the comics and have only been exposed to the MCU in recent times (aside from when I binged the 90s Spider-man show during lockdown). In some ways this game reminded me why I liked Marvel stories prior to the MCU and Disney acquisition, so I'll probably go back and binge the X-men show and some of the other cartoons I haven't seen at some point.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Oh my god, I've figured it out: this game isn't an XCOM, it's a STARDEW VALLEY!

Your character joins a small community full of people who are all quirky and hot and want to hang out with you all the time. Every day, you wake up and do your chores: unlocking gamma coils, choosing research projects, upgrading cards, combat training. Then you figure out which of the locals you want to spend your day with, hang out with them, and even try to find the perfect gift to give them. Once you've exhausted your social options, you go to work in the mines (play a mission), before coming back to town to spend the evening at the saloon (book club/shop class). All the while, your main goal is to figure out how to rebuild the community center (Sanctum Sanctorum).

I don't know what to do about this information, but I figured it might help anyone who was wondering what this game was.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I'm still picking away at this, although the pace has slowed down a bit from when I started. I think I'm pretty close to the end at this point, since we just added Wanda to the team, although I believe there's still one more character that I'll pick up through the main story. I also have Deadpool, whose main gimmick is that his cards get more powerful if he hogs the spotlight and takes multiple actions in a single turn. I was actually kind of impressed with what his DLC adds to the game: along with the new character (and the whole associated friendship questline), you also get a new series of story missions featuring new environments, new enemy types and even a boss. I'm a little bummed that I'll probably finish the game before the rest of the DLC drops, since it all mixes into the main campaign in a fairly seamless way. Considering how substantial Firaxis add-ons have been in the past, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. If I'm lucky, Venom will drop sooner rather than later - but barring that, I'll wait for all three of the DLC characters to be out and then come back to play their stories together.

Mechanically speaking, the game has certainly gotten more interesting...but considering how long it is, I'm starting to get a little bored of the combat despite that. There seems to be a real dearth of DPS characters on the roster, so I've built Hunter around powerful single strikes, since she goes on most of the missions anyway. The other characters mostly fall into the support or crowd control buckets, but I do feel like they all have pretty distinct identities. The biggest issue is that I find it tough to build synergistic decks for everyone because of the sheer number of possible team comps there are. Each hero works well on their own, but you can't build for a specific two-hero combo when you know that they'll often be on missions without their partner.

One thing that helps keep the game engaging for me is the difficulty, which can pretty easily be tailored to your desired level. I've bumped the difficulty up three times so far, which keeps the missions at a spot where I need to stay pretty focused to win, but can soak one or two mistakes without everything going to hell. I very often have heroes get KO'd, but I haven't failed any story missions yet, so that seems like a good balance to me. I should probably ratchet things up again, though, just to see how far I can push it before we get a team wipe.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

It's finally over! 69 (nice) hours later, I have completed the main story of Midnight Suns, along with 3 of the 4 DLC campaigns. If there's one thing that I've taken away from this game, it's that I don't really understand how it got made. Firaxis took a solid, occasionally great tactics game and then bolted like 45 hours of mediocre story, exploration and crafting on to it. Maybe the most surprising part is the sheer amount of voiced dialog - who okayed the budget for all that recording time?? It ends up feeling like eating at a buffet restaurant: there's a near-limitless quantity of stuff of all kinds, but most of it isn't very good. Despite that, the game kind of succeeds at being a comfy hangout simulator, broken up by combat missions that are usually engaging. But everything is served in Texas-sized portions, and even the best bits occasionally got stale with the repetition.

Despite the overwhelming amount of stuff already present in Midnight Suns, I am glad that I took a chance and picked up a version of the game that came with the DLC. The expansions have all been quite good so far, which isn't a surprise when you look at Firaxis' track record for add-ons. Each DLC character has their own set of cards, of course, but also comes with the full storyline that features custom missions and all the hangouts you could want. The missions aren't just filler, either - they feature new enemy types, locations and even bosses. At one point, I found myself facing down frickin' Dracula of all people, in what wound up being a knock-down, drag-out fight. YMMV on the characters themselves (seriously, who was clamoring for Morbius?), but Deadpool has been entertaining to have around the base and Venom is a really fun character to use in combat. I'm a little bummed that I finished the game before Storm dropped, because I'm willing to bet she will have some really fun cards in her deck. But overall, I'm happy to have had the three extra characters in my main playthrough, since they fit into the existing campaign and bring the average level of quality up.