Marvel’s Midnight Suns is the year’s biggest surprise

videogameschronicle.com:

It’s difficult to remember a game that last subverted our expectations quite as strongly as Marvel’s Midnight Suns. From the first trailer, howls of worry shot out across the Multiverse as players were convinced that the strategy titans at Firaxis were heading down the card game mines, with worries of microtransaction-laced packs of cards flooding the early impression of the game.

But thankfully, after dozens of hours with Marvel’s Midnight Suns we’re happy to report these fears were completely unwarranted. Marvel’s Midnight Sun is a strategy game with cards, but it’s not a card game. More of a tactical RPG that happens to use deck-based combat, that also features a cast of incredible characters and a relationship management game alongside it.

You play as The Hunter, a new, wholly original character created in collaboration with Marvel. Locked away for generations, The Hunter is called into action when The Midnight Suns are faced with the world-ending threat of Lilith, a seemingly unstoppable demon hell-bent on taking over.

The Hunter is a blank canvas for the player, and while the character creator isn’t overwhelming, there are some fun combinations of clothing, hairstyles and skin tones that will make every Hunter unique.

At the start of a mission, you’ll choose three heroes from the pool of a dozen or so, with some story missions requiring some specific characters come along for the ride. While these story missions usually ensure that some characters aren’t massively over-levelled, if you spend enough time in the general missions as we did with our favourites, you can cause some imbalance in your team.

Each character has a deck of cards, more of which can be acquired via doing missions, or improved versions of said cards