Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a deckbuilding, turn-based tactics game developed by Firaxis Games. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Review Overview
Marvel's Midnight Suns Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Interesting and Engaging Combat Diverse and Unique Characters Actually Good Create-A-Character |
2K Launcher Is Garbage Issues Regarding Save Files Grindy Crafting Is Painful |
Marvel's Midnight Suns Overall
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is what I’d call a hidden gem. It’s a unique combination of a card battler, a tactics game, and a social simulation game all packed into one package that has the Marvel label on it. It’s able to introduce players to a different cast of other Marvel characters, especially to those who haven’t really touched the comics and are not familiar to the more mystical side of Marvel. Everything works, weirdly enough, and it’s a game that should be given a try especially for those who want to try something new.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Story
You play as the Hunter, a fully customizable hero, tasked to take down Lilith, the Mother of Demons, once more with the new Midnight Suns. It’s a fairly standard and straightforward story, but with a bigger focus on the magical side of Marvel. It’s not the most groundbreaking story, or the most compelling one, but it does tell a good story nonetheless. It does a good job of showcasing every superhero involved in the game, while giving them the spotlight at times in such a loaded game.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Gameplay
It’s a weird, yet creative amalgamation of turn-based tactics, card battler, and social simulation. It has the strategy part down with the gameplay and managing your resources as well as how to synergize your attacks. Each character has their own deck with special abilities and attacks while sharing the resource with all of the party members in the fight. Everyone shares resources to build and spend, and each character has their own gimmick to use in combat. The social aspect isn’t my favorite, but it does a good job of introducing you to your allies. It’s a good way to showcase these characters to those who aren’t familiar with the other characters.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Visuals
The game doesn’t look too bad, but it’s not the best looking game either. It has its moments where the game legitimately looks good, but the performance would have you needing to turn down the visuals of the game for a better experience. The game features cosmetics for the player character and the playable super heroes, with more choices for the latter. You get to play dress up for your character with different colors, clothes, and even straight up changing your appearance.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Audio
The sound design of the game isn’t so good, where the audio may even desync when changing windows on PC. The music is fairly repetitive especially since you will be grinding quite a bit. The voice acting is pretty good, but not exactly stellar. It does help that most of the dialogue in the game is voiced which makes the experience a lot better.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Value for Money
It’s a pretty good $60 game. There’s a lot to unpack in the game especially with optimizing your heroes’ loadouts and cards. It’s already been a year since its release and all of the downloadable content is out, so you might want to pick up the game on sale especially with all the DLC intact. However, learning how to maximize and upgrade your heroes is also a learning curve in itself. You might get burnt out from mindlessly grinding missions to get currency to upgrade your heroes if you don’t research how to manipulate the RNG of the game.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Review: It's Midnightin' Time
It’s been a full year since this game was released and honestly I still haven’t seen a game that was able to achieve what Marvel’s Midnight Suns was able to do. Like I said earlier, the game is a weird amalgamation of turn-based tactics, card battler, and social simulation all in one package. It’s a very unique game, one with a Marvel brand slapped on it as well. I’d argue that this is one of the better ways to introduce an MCU fan to acclimate them to obscure personalities and characters that are only found in the comics. It has deep gameplay mechanics and unique characters that all round out the great experience.
First, let’s talk about the gameplay. In my experience of playing turn-based games, it either comes down to stealing your opponents’ turns via speed, crowd control, etc. or taking out as much of the enemies as possible in a single turn. Midnight Suns goes with the latter, as you will always be outnumbered in all encounters but with the added caveat that you can take down all the enemies in a single turn with proper planning. The game’s tutorial teaches you a number of things, like how to use the environment, heroic cards, and how to string together kills using Quick cards.
By the end of Act 1, you may have already realized that the cards aren’t the only way to impact the battlefield. The game does NOT have a "random chance to hit" and this makes planning all the more worthwhile as everything will hit its target (except using gravity, but that’s fair because it’s a one-hit kill to push people off the map). Maximizing your resources by abusing modifiers like Quick, Free, etc. is the name of the game, and the game slowly teaches you this as well as upping the difficulty to earn more rewards.
There are a lot of characters that are playable in the game, and they all come with their very own gimmicks. For example, Magik has portals that can reposition enemies to your advantage, Spider-Man has cards that enhance the use of environmental objects as well as give you more resources to move characters per turn, so on and so forth. I think it was genius to have the characters be injured from time to time so that you’re forced to use everyone at least once in your playthroughs. It’s crucial that you know how to use each hero and how to play to their strengths, as there will be some missions that require certain heroes other than your player character.
Overall, the game is a pretty good experience. You get to know more about Marvel’s mystical side, which is very valuable to people who don’t know much about the comics. You also get to experience a unique package of genres you didn’t know that could work together. It’s a long game, filled with tons of dialogue, side content, and even more unique characters, and it’s definitely worth playing if you disable the 2K Launcher immediately.
Pros of Marvel's Midnight Suns
| Things Marvel's Midnight Suns Got Right |
|---|
|
Interesting and Engaging Combat Diverse and Unique Characters Actually Good Create-A-Character |
Interesting and Engaging Combat
The game has a great combat sequence, one that balances character gimmicks and universal mechanics. Your resources of movement, card plays, redraws, and even the cards in your hand is shared by the whole party. This means that there will be times that a character does not have a card in your hand or one character has ALL the cards in your hand. Knowing how the modifiers and how to maximize your damage is the key to victory as well as efficiency. One thing to note is that, your movement is limited to how the cards position your character as well as the shared movement resource. Proper positioning of both your team and the enemies may lead to big turns and can also award you the victory immediately.
Diverse and Unique Characters
The game is completely stacked with Marvel characters that people know about like Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and Spider-Man. Some characters like Blade, Magik, and Nico aren't super well-known characters but the game does a marvelous job of showing off what they can do. Every character has their own gimmick and knowing how to use these gimmicks is the best way to enjoy the game's combat system. Spider-Man can give more movement resources as well as make environmental damage free for the turn, Iron Man gets more modifiers on Redraws, and etc. The game layers its universal mechanics with unique gimmicks that synergize with each other. Finding the balance of utility and damage as well as the right chemistry for your team is the surefire way to easily dominate the battlefield.
Actually Good Create-A-Character
The main character, the Hunter, is a completely customizable character. They even market the game as having the first-ever customizable main character for Marvel as well. The Hunter is a formidable combatant where you can actually focus their alignment to being either Light or Dark. Light-aligned cards tend to focus on utility and buffing you or your team's next cards while Dark-aligned cards focus on offense and dealing damage. Either way you put it, the Hunter is one of the most valuable members of the team, and arguably the best character in the roster due to how much they can influence the battlefield immediately.
Cons of Marvel's Midnight Suns
| Things That Marvel's Midnight Suns Can Improve |
|---|
|
2K Launcher Is Garbage Issues Regarding Save Files Grindy Crafting is Painful |
2K Launcher Is Garbage
The 2K Launcher is garbage. It guts the performance of the game if you launch it from there. Many people (myself included) thought that the game was unplayable when it released back in 2022 because we thought the game had bad optimization. While the optimization isn't the greatest, the core issue was simply the launcher itself. Do yourself a favor and change the launch options to start on the right executable file so that you can actually play the game.
Issues Regarding Save Files
I played this game on and off throughout the year, so imagine my frustration when I thought my save files were gone and a good 40 hours were wasted. After a full year of updates and DLCs, it's quite sad that the cloud saving function is still an issue for both PC and consoles. For PC, you might see that the issue is just that the game has a different folder for its saves and you could find your saves easily just by looking through it. For consoles however, it may be trickier than just looking through your files and may need you to reinstall the game or actually back up your cloud saves.
Grindy Crafting is Painful
The game is grindy, especially when you're at the point where you're upgrading or optimizing your heroes' cards. Currency can be gained from exploring the game's headquarters and through missions. The main problem is that the cost of upgrading will be expensive depending on the modifiers that you're trying to go for. Modifiers such as Quick (Refunds card play after KO), Free (No cost on use), and Draw x cards on KO are pretty rare modifiers. You might want to learn how to manipulate the game's RNG to efficiently upgrade the cast.
Is Marvel's Midnight Suns Worth It?
Buy it on Sale! Definitely worth getting the DLC
The game is already a year old and all of the DLC is already available. With the current Steam Winter Sale, the game is currently 67% off, chopping the price down to $20 for the base game and the Legendary Edition to $30. I think that adding the DLC is worth it since it adds 4 new playable heroes (especially Deadpool) and adds more context to the story. Even without the DLC, the game takes a while to beat. It has a lot of content for a game that’s a year old and goes on sale quite often.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Overview & Premise
Play as The Hunter, a legendary demon slayer who must lead a team of heroes and warriors to face a new apocalyptic threat.
Marvel's Midnight Suns FAQ
I lost my Marvel's Midnight Suns save file! What do I do?
This normally happens to PC players of Marvel's Midnight Suns. Check your PC's default drive Documents folder and check the "My Games" folder. It may be possible that the game made a different folder and started to read the wrong folder. After checking and confirming that there are multiple folders with your files intact in one of them, simply copy and paste your saves into the newer folder. Don't forget to back up your save files! This might happen more often that you'd think.
How long does it take to beat Marvel’s Midnight Suns?
The game takes around 30-35 hours to beat just the main story. Optimizing and getting the 100% will easily double and maybe triple that number.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Product Information
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| Title | MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS |
|---|---|
| Release Date | December 2, 2022 |
| Developer | Firaxis Games |
| Publisher | 2K |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam, Epic Games), PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One |
| Genre | Turn-Based Tactics, Deckbuilding |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | 12 |
| Official Website | Marvel's Midnight Suns Website |
