Midnight Suns: I was expecting Marvel’s XCOM and got a Fire Emblem with superheroes

Actually, I thought I knew what to expect in Midnight Suns. A Marvel XCOM where my units’ abilities are represented by decks of cards. To a large extent, that’s true, at least on the battlefield. And yet the new Firaxis game already shows a side of itself in the first chapter that I was allowed to play that I didn’t expect. It’s a far more social and storytelling experience than XCOM has ever been.

It’s hard to overstate how talkative Midnight Suns is. You spend at least as much time exploring the home base in an old abbey in Salem, famous for its witch burnings, as you do the actual missions, at least initially. XCOM 2 already had significantly more ambitions to turn the marginal figures in the base into real characters. Midnight Suns has finally set its mind on becoming a full-fledged “story game”.

And that includes exploring your HQ on foot with direct controls, changing the decor, dressing up and chatting with other superheroes, giving compliments and gifts to increase (or decrease) your friendship level as if you had Intelligent Systems made a Marvel game instead of the next Fire Emblem. Add to that a few quests and simple and somewhat waist-tight exploration around the abbey to complete the story of the main character, the Hunter. Cool on paper and at least not badly implemented in reality.

But of course the central character and team progression also takes place in the base. Every day you have Tony Stark or Doctor Strange Loot analyzed, start new research or commission improvements to the base. You exchange coils you have won for new cards and combine duplicate cards into a stronger, new version. This isn’t really rocket science, but it has to be said here that the game may complicate things a bit too much if one of three different currencies – so-called essences – have to be paid for the upgrade depending on the card type. It might be that this becomes a bit too restrictive in the long run. And the fact that all kinds of essence spawns regularly as a findable item in the abbey should be an idea too much legwork for players who are actually only here for tactics. Who wants to slip through the cracks when it comes to rewards?

In any case, at the beginning I actually wanted either more speed and active game parts – or more extensive descriptions of why Lilith’s resurrection by Hydra is now so bad, because we simply see too little of this central threat at the beginning. Nevertheless, it is interesting what happens here once you have adjusted your expectations in terms of the game shares. The voice actors for the heroes do a good job almost all of the time – minus the female version of the Hunter, who remains quite pale – and I think the character dynamics between the troop and each other could make for an interesting story. And hey: You can also pet the slippery demon dog Charlie who hangs around here!

On the other hand, the map gameplay, so wary of some at first, gives me little concern. Also, because Firaxis’ XCOM past flashes crystal clear when the mission objectives include salvaging items, protecting a MacGuffin, or destroying a helicopter that is taking off before it takes off. We already know this brand of lean tactics from this team, which indulges in volume management and maximizing one’s impact. Nevertheless, the cards mean that you have to change your playing style decisively.

It starts with the fact that the cards, of which you can play three in a round, also dictate to a large extent the movements of your characters across the rather small battlefields. You only actively issue movement commands to one character per turn, and even that is only really necessary if you want to carry out an attack using an environment object, or if you want to move a hero out of the radius of an area-of-effect attack at the last moment. Other actions you can perform: Play an item (also in card form) from the inventory and put away two cards that are currently not helping you to draw new ones.

The rest, as indicated, is done by the cards and the secondary effects they cast. Although right now I’m still surprised how much revolves around playing pool with the enemies, knocking them backwards, into exploding level inventory or against each other. Actively repositioning your opponents is an important part of every mission, especially since you often have to keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time: the opponents almost always signal who they are going to attack next, and the balancing act between effective damage distribution, the Protecting your own people and fulfilling a mission goal consistently makes you sweat. At the same time, you should always try to play cards that increase heroism, which in turn is needed to launch your most powerful moves. There’s a lot of tactics in just a few squares and I like that very, very much.

A preliminary word on tech: Unfortunately, another parallel to the last XCOM is the performance: Midnight Suns looks good and there’s a lot of power and impact in the actions of the superheroes, while the effects are really gorgeous. At the same time, even without ray tracing, performance on my RTX 3080 is often closer to 60 than 100 frames per second, which doesn’t feel right given what’s on offer. On the Steam deck, the game does not always keep the 30 FPS stable with medium settings. It’s always playable, but I still see room for improvement.

Either way: My first ten hours with Midnight Suns were already very enlightening. Just yesterday I started incorporating non-card-playing area attacks into my game more efficiently, and more “quick” versions of attacks that also save a card, and therefore an action, in the case of a Kos. I’m starting to prioritize the order in which I play cards more intelligently and to experiment with character decks. I’m even learning to appreciate characters I initially disliked. The Midnight Suns battlefield page underscores once again what brilliant tactical minds Firaxis has. Now I’m just curious to see if and how much hard work there is in building the base and the superhero dating sim that Midnight Suns also wants to be. I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is out December 2nd for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series.