Saturday Morning Gaming: Marvel’s Midnight Suns

The initial reviews of Marvel’s Midnight Suns said “This is like XCom and Slay the Spire”. I don’t know about you, but, like, those are among my absolute favorite games. So I went to check it out on Steam and what was the first thing that I noticed?

This:

MICROTRANSACTIONS!

And the second thing I noticed? The game plus the season pass was $100. $100? That’s, like, a hundred dollars! So I shrugged and said “I’ll get it when it goes on sale.”

I mean, the thing that irritates me most about the whole “season pass” thing is that it went from a way to give you an opportunity to get all of a game’s DLC up front (something I vaguely support when “DLC” means “expansions of the original game”) to a way to sell the customer 80% of a completed game and then nickel and diming them to get the whole thing.

So maybe it was a good game, maybe it wasn’t. But I wasn’t going to pay $100 to find out.

This was a year and a half ago.

This weekend, the game is on sale for 75% off. $25. Given that I measured the whole game as maybe being worth fifty bucks if it wasn’t for the microtransactions, I measured this as being 50% off. And 50% off of a game that reviews say is a combination of your two favorite genres? Well, that’s a risk worth taking.

So I picked it up.

I’ve only just wandered through the tutorial and I’ve noticed two things:

1. The overlap with XCom is somewhat overstated (so far, anyway). It’s more that there are attacks that do stuff like “push the enemy” and if you push the enemy into an obstacle or another enemy, you can do damage to both. You can’t really push an enemy sideways so you have to position yourself opposite them to get them lined up.

2. There is a *LOT* of somewhat cringey/Reddit dialog. It’s one thing to have Spider-Man give quips every two seconds. It’s quite another to have the various title cards make quips. Here’s an example:

And, so far, pretty much all of the dialog is like this.

When stuff like this was rare, I suppose it came across as irreverent and subversive. But when it’s everywhere? It’s not subversive anymore. Whatever it has been attempting to subvert is no longer dominant. So it’s just irreverent. I found myself saying “yeah, yeah, get back to the game” every single time something like this popped up. And it was *CONSTANTLY* popping up.

But if you are lucky enough to not even notice that sort of thing, you’ll be able to enjoy the gameplay.

Which, so far, isn’t bad.

After the tutorial, you create your own character. You are the child of The Big Bad in the game and you defeated her centuries ago and now it’s time for you to defeat her again:

Sadly, you can’t make them chubby.

The game has you alternate between your home base (full of customizable stuff) and battle and both are pretty competent. You can customize your character’s outfits, you can run around and talk to the other heroes who talk to you like you didn’t just wake up after three centuries, you can use the heroes’ messageboard and read their “funny” quips to each other, and you can tweak your decks:

You run around a battlefield and you knock enemies into enemies, enemies into obstacles, or obstacles into enemies. I haven’t encountered “cover” yet (but I’m only a handful of missions into the game).

You draw cards from your pool and you play them against the enemies. In addition to straightforward attacks, each hero has stuff that (so far) is unique to them: Blade has cards that can make opponents “bleed”, Iron Man has cards that can do damage to everyone on the field, Captain Marvel has cards that do damage in a straight line… that sort of thing.

All in all, I’m pleased that I got the game and if I can get over the “humor”, I’m going to be delighted that I picked it up.

But, seriously, when everybody is talking like Spider-Man, it’s not interesting when Spider-Man shows up and starts wisecracking. He’s just doing what everybody else in the game does.

So… what are you playing?