Marvel’s Midnight Suns review: too much dialogue

You would think that with a name like Firaxis behind the project, and knowing their love of tactics and strategy, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is above all a “superhero X-COM”. It’s not entirely false, but it’s not entirely true either. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an RPG-tinged tactical action game, with maps, social mechanics and of course, a slew of superpowers. It’s a title that wants to mix a lot of things and that goes to great lengths to make all these ideas coexist thanks to a balancing act that commands respect.

marvel’s Midnight Sunsso it’s first of all a game where superheroes stick it in turn-based combat. We play a certain Hunter, who wakes up from a nap of a few hundred years. He joins the new Midnight Suns team to stop Lilith, who has also decided that she is going to wake up, but to take over the world. Barely has he time to be hazed by Blade that this good Hunter is sent to the front to put an end to the actions of the big villain with the fluorescent green eyes and to massacre hundreds of Hydra soldiers who protect her. . A great villain, naughty Nazis of the future: in its scenario, it is a pure Marvel game, to which Firaxis has stuck tactical mechanics.

Where you compose your squad in X-COM, with soldiers created by us to whom you become attached over time, it is slightly different here. Each fight starts with the composition of a trio of superheroes from an already established selection drawing from a certain number of Marvel licenses: Spider-Man, Blade, Captain Marvel, Ghost Rider or Magik – there are thirteen superheroes in total. heroes that are playable during battles. They each have their own deck of cards. Cards that represent their different powers to cast on the battlefield as you would in a classic card game, using action points and re-draw each turn. There is a natural part of randomness in the drawing of cards, and you have to learn to live with it to understand the somewhat particular systems of the game.

In this Marvel game, you have to believe in the soul of the cards

No box to divide the field, no percentage chance during an attack, no cover system either. It might look like a bit of a light wing for a tactical but, fortunately, the addition of the cards energizes the formula and adds depth to the game by encouraging us to constantly assess the risks of each decision made. marvel’s Midnight Suns is a game that gives crucial importance to placement and limits our actions, which reinforces the tactical dimension: we can’t do everything, so it’s better to think three moves ahead to place a devastating combo on several enemies rather than full of successive individual attacks.

Added to this are fairly basic principles of synergy when composing a team, with some superheroes specializing in zone attacks, healing or more precise but powerful attacks. Choosing to go with Iron Man rather than Ghost Rider can matter depending on the level and the objective – even turning an easy mission into a bitter failure.

The playing field also features quite a few interactive elements that require heroism points (a value that rises during combat as cards are played) but can offer free attacks by swinging a terrain element at a character’s face. enemy or by embedding it in an electric meter. Contrary to XCOM, Marvel’s Midnight Suns rarely freezes his fights, where everyone spends their time flying from one end to the other taking chestnuts. This is something that is even strongly encouraged by some hero cards that offer the Boost ability. It allows fairly quickly to create combinations of attacks by sending enemies on top of each other like bowling pins.

And then, beyond the mechanical advantages of using the area as your playground, the title also rewards with the avalanche of contextual animations that accompany the attacks. The animators at Firaxis have done a phenomenal job of bringing turn-based combat to life, using codes from Marvel licenses to create varied visual builds and spectacular executions. Visually, you never get bored. It wasn’t easy, but it genuinely feels like playing the same superheroes as in the movies.

Like Loft Story, but with superheroes

Well, everything is going well, the fights are pleasant, we start to have fun but suddenly, it’s the tragedy: the fight ends, the gauges of rewards fill up and, after a loading time, the camera switches to third-person view and Hunter can be directly controlled in a closed area. Welcome to the second part of marvel’s Midnight Suns, the one he drags on his feet like a ball and chain. Welcome to the Abbey.

The Abbey is the lair that we visit after each mission while strolling like in an action-RPG. This is where you can improve your cards, open crates obtained during missions, train for combat and pick up nonsense from loot to craft stuff and collect other stuff. Oh, and it’s especially where you spend time with your best friends: all the playable superheroes in combat wander around the Abbey like lost souls and are just waiting for one thing: that you come. talk to them to tell their life story.

It’s a line that we didn’t necessarily expect to find in the Firaxis specifications, but which easily occupies more than half of the game. When not fighting, Midnight Suns requires us to go and chat with everyone and walk from one room to another to go organize a birthday party at Magik or help Wolverine open a jar of pickles. These interactions raise individual friendship gauges that give access to new abilities, new costumes and, sometimes, side missions. Of course, you can imagine that there are forty thousand ways to make Spider-Man and Captain Marvel your BFFs, and it’s time to talk about Retreats.

retirement home

While walking in the Abbey, one can have the pleasure of coming across an area stamped Retirement, where it is possible to invite the superhero of his choice to engage in a socially rewarding activity. It can be going for a swim with Captain Marvel (by selecting his best Legendary Swimsuit looted in a mission), playing video games with Blade, picking mushrooms with Tony Stark or reading a book with Ghost Rider . Each of these special moments with the heroes will strengthen the bonds of friendship and, at a certain stage, it is even possible to unlock super cards that use the power of friendship to inflict great damage in combat. Take inspiration from social mechanics similar to Persona or Fire Emblem Three Houses is a good idea on paper, but everything looks awfully hollow here.

Befriending someone in Persona goes through believable dialogues, immersive scenes and a rhythm worked enough to never give the impression of being bored, even in front of hours of dialogues. It’s an expertise that is not given to everyone, and we feel that Firaxis had to tinker with the tools it had at hand. The social mechanics are shoehorned in, through relentless cutscenes and a fictional social network where Spider-Man and Doctor Strange can send private messages and offer little hangouts.

As soon as a dialogue begins, the time becomes terribly long and, after a good ten hours of play, we see nothing other than these shots/reverse shots cut out with a trowel, these faces in the very artistic direction plastic and these walking animations probably made in a hurry. It may happen that the writing of a few jokes hits the mark, but these are drowned in such an ocean of nonsense that they are not enough to make you forget the rest. Worse, the ordeal does not end as soon as the characters have finished talking, because the game often finds a way to make Hunter trudge to pick up tarot cards or diary scraps through the Abbey.

That’s a lot to do besides fighting, and that’s why Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a particularly long game. Too long a game – even: the campaign is around 60 hours of play, and can climb up to 90 if you decide to pick up all the trinkets that are put in your way and listen to each dialogue religiously. It’s crazy, though. As if we felt obliged, each time we develop a game based on Marvel licenses, to try to make a film of it at the same time. Because it’s not so much the length of the game that’s the problem here — we’ve seen players go through hundreds of hours on X-COM 2 – rather the rhythm. Midnight Suns takes a good ten hours before it really starts and, once started, you often feel like you’re being slowed down by miles of lines of dialogue and sluggish social obligations. We may be happy to go see Captain America and Iron Man at the cinema on a Sunday afternoon, but for sixty hours, we sometimes come close to indigestion.

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