Game review: Marvel’s Midnight Suns for EGS

I don’t think I can overstate how divided I am on the two facets of Marvel Midnight Suns. One side is a comic book soap opera with limited input on the player’s part, and the other is a terrible card game that almost made me rage quit several times.

I might make comic book soap opera sound bad, but all the best comics from my youth fell firmly and sweetly into that comfortable groove. You can’t have all X-Men battles without some romance and rivalries on the side. There’s no stakes in the fights if I don’t care who’s fighting, or without knowing whom they are fighting for, right?

Conversely, I might make the term card game sound fun, but not only does this version take every annoying aspect of deckbuilding games into its model, it adds new, deeply aggravating limitations to the genre. But I will get into all of that after covering the basics.

Midnight Suns is a retelling of a Marvel classic, the battle between Lilith, mother of all demons, and Marvel’s grittiest, darkest heroes. Most of the heroes from the print run I read got the chop, although I believe there is a later version I didn’t read that added in some of the new guys. But totally new to this version is The Hunter, the original offspring of Lilith. Supposedly, she killed Lilith and then died herself, so now that Hydra has resurrected Lilith, the Caretaker and the Midnight Suns choose to revive The Hunter as well.

There’s a lot of cut-scenes and dialogue options upfront, which is normally a headache for me. But I know most of these characters and love them already, so I gave them a lot more benefit of the doubt than I would for newly minted RPG characters. Expanding on that, I don’t believe I would have stuck with the game if I wasn’t already invested in the characters from outside sources. But I did get into this soap opera, with tension between the Suns and the Avengers, between Tony and Stephen, or Carol and Blade. It’s like a bag of Starburst to me, a mixture of nostalgia and way too much sugar, and I was ready for all of it.

I said there’s limited input, so I should explain. During conversations, the Hunter is given a chance to say stuff. Some of it is valued toward the light, granting them points on that side of their nature and unlocking cards with light powers. Some obviously goes the opposite way, and some are just neutral.

Each option can also add or subtract from a friendship meter, which might make it seem like it has consequences. But no, you can just spar with the same hero to win back three points, or take them out on a side quest. It’s actually hard to end up with a negative balance of points unless you’re trying to piss someone off. In any case, most of the time the other character will still say something like “I’ll do what I want anyway.” No matter what you say, the end result is the same. It’s the same kind of fake role play that I noticed and disliked in Dragon Age: Inquisition. So why does this pass muster for me? Because the side stories in Midnight Suns are a lot more satisfying even if my input on the end results is meaningless.

I only wish the level of writing creativity in the soap opera department had been shared with the main storyline. But alas, each story mission builds up to a moment like, “This is it! This is our best chance to turn the tide!” So I win the first part of the story mission, a cut scene plays in which the guy I just stomped into the pavement jumps up and goes, “Ha, psych! I win, you lose!” So I have to play another match in a slightly different area. I win, and the cut scene informs me that I in fact suffered the most debilitating loss, EVER. Rinse and repeat for all three chapters. How do so many games have such compelling side stories and the most predictable garbage for the main story? Maybe tell the directors to back off and let the writers from the side quests have more creative input? I dunno, let’s move on.

As I said at the beginning, the card game is atrocious. Like many entries in the genre, I am saddled with a deck of cards that can cripple me every other turn, making it impossible to attack while the enemy units get to use the same attacks over and over. The problem here lies in Hero cards, which cost Hero Points to cast. You can get a whole hand of them, with no basic attack or ability cards to charge points up. You get only two redraws, and I promise you, most of the time, you’ll either pull up an even more expensive card, or the exact same card you just threw away. (There will be more on that later.)

A lot of why the decks suck is because every hero is limited to eight cards, and every deck has to follow a strict set of rules. You must have at least one of each type of card, and no deck can exceed four of the same type. Additionally, you can’t have more than two of the same card. So because of this, you can’t have one hero be full support, using only ability cards to generate Hero points for their other two teammates. Or an ally with all basic attacks to at least nickel and dime the minions off the field while building up another hero to smack the boss down.

It also doesn’t help that the starting decks for so many heroes are pathetic. To get better cards, you have to use them in the field and win Gamma Coils. I took the coils to Tony Stark, who extracted new cards, and while he plays out his little animation, I’m praying to RNGesus, “Just give me something that doesn’t suck.” But unlike Blade, most of those early cards do suck.

So a lot of the early game is avoiding story missions, grinding in the ol’ hamster wheel to find cards to shore up mediocre heroes so that when the real fights occur, they don’t become another handicap in a game already loaded with them.

(Oh, side note: I’m leaving out a whole other aspect, exploring the home base to unlock secrets and complete collections and diaries, and that’s because it’s so lackluster as to be unremarkable.)

Which brings up the other weak point of the game, a distinct lack of variety. The titular team of the Midnight Suns alone have enough villains and monsters in their respective comics to build a great game, and Doctor Strange has a whole roster of demons who could have teamed up with Lilith for extra variety. But this game is all Hydra for most of the first chapter. (Out of three.) They eventually bring in Venom as a boss of sorts, but then it’s all the same rut: it’s a Hydra, Hydra, Hydra, Hydra, oh no! It’s a Venom!

The later chapters add a little variety to enemy types and bosses, but again, there were so many existing methods to make this journey feel like an adventure instead of a slog, and all of that was ignored. The matches are a tedious grind to get back to the interesting bits between the boring game itself.

Each time I win against Venom or any other boss, the game yells out “K-O!” But then Venom gets up and runs away, as do the others. So instead of knockout, K-O has to mean something else involving escape. At the very least, send them to SHIELD prisons before letting them escape again. The heroes just letting them walk off after each match is pathetic.

Oh, and the game treats every single match type as a tutorial. So as soon as the match starts, there’s a popup explaining the goal. Then Sara, the Caretaker, talks to you throughout the match to remind you what steps to follow. You knock down the guard of a Hydra agent, and she’ll shout “Quick, capture that agent before they get their bearings!” (Even though you’re out of card moves and can’t do it until the next turn.) This is repeated for every single match, in case you’re either a moron or a victim of recent blunt force head trauma.

While I’m on the topic, I hate the Caretaker. Supposedly a mentor and guide to the Midnight Suns, she is the single most abrasive and condescending character I’ve ever seen in all of Marvel history. When I have to sit through multiple scenes of this asshat chiding Doctor Stephen fucking Strange about the dangers of magic like he’s a five year old, it just makes me wish I had more input as the Hunter to say something like “Well I’m the leader now, so shut the fuck up already.”

But finally let me circle back around to an earlier point. I made decks to test this one part over and over, so let me explain my methodology. Near the end of the game, I had collected enough cards for many heroes to have four attack cards, three ability cards, and only one hero card each. With only three hero abilities in play, it should be impossible to get hamstrung by a bad hand full of hero cards yes?

No, because of Hero combo cards. These also cost points, but they cannot be used against vehicles or other destructible objectives, making them useless for several of the match types. (Destroy the helicopter, disable the truck, break the gamma bomb, etc.) So, I discard them only to get either another Hero combo or another hero card.

Where I’m going with this is, there’s only one copy of any hero card, right? So when I discard it, it should go into the graveyard and be cast again later, right? NOPE! You can toss a unique hero card and have it returned to your hand immediately because THERE IS NO DECK. It’s just RNG, and so that means this hunk of monotonous junk doesn’t just regurgitate all the flaws of deckbuilding games. No, it eschews the concept of a deck to find new ways to fuck me over, too.

That is why I’m giving Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2 stars. You’ve seen me be generous with recent games for at least having a good story, but no amount of sappy super hero soap opera can remove the sting of losing matches because the most basic functions of a card game are broken intentionally. I recommend this to no one, and I hope when Cthon rises, they violate the orifices of the directors who designed this game.