1. Marvel's Midnight Suns, dev. Firaxis Games
Superhero movies are not in a good place. Superhero games are in a much worse place. I've become something of a biographer of all these Marvel disasters over the years. I really like most of these games that nobody wanted to play. That Avengers game from 2020 had a solid single player campaign if you just ignored all the Games as a Service crap. Guardians of the Galaxy from 2021 was a fantastic video game, no caveats needed. Somehow I never find time for the big Sony Spider-Man games, but I found time for Midnight Suns, a game so unsuccessful that 2K fired its director, Jake Solomon, fired Firaxis studio head, Steve Martin, and were not coy in admitting the game flopped.
Clearly I gotta play this Suicide Squad game. That might be GOTY 2024, who knows?
Midnight Suns came out December 2nd, 2022N obody played it in 2022, let's us be honest with ourselves here. Everybody was too busy with Pokemon, God of War, hopefully Pentiment, whatever. Midnight Suns went on sale three months later and that was its real release date. Also, it had DLC support throughout 2023 despite missing its director and 2K asking that everybody forget about this miscalculation. "Let's think instead about that next Civilization game! Investors, money to be made! Do not look at the mountainous piles of your money we set on fire!" Not me though, I wanna talk about goofy superheroes. Because Midnight Suns is the best superhero failure yet.
There was a universe where Firaxis just made XCOM 3 and probably made more money, plus had a more secure future. Instead they did something entirely different. On the surface, every choice they made seems safe. People like(d) Marvel, even if I'm not sure there is a big fanbase for the Midnight Suns team specifically. (Most of the game's cast are not even part of that crew, which makes it more confusing.) Card games are extremely popular, including a successful card games in this very IP, Marvel Champions and Marvel Snap. And while it will never overthrow the mighty FPS, tactical RPGs have been thriving in the last decade. Mixing those three things together, however, was a bold choice and a difficult choice. Nobody has ever made a game like Midnight Suns before. This is not an XCOM game without aliens, if you just want that, you can play the Mario + Rabbids game. No Midnight Suns is the confluence of a deck builder, billiards, chess, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. With cosmetics. Firaxis found themselves creating a whole new genre here, and well, maybe there is not room in the market for new genres. At least not on the investment scale that a AAA game demands.
The first big choice is removing grids and distance entirely as tactical considerations. Your characters can pretty much attack anything from anywhere. Meanwhile, non-combat moves are very much at a premium. We're not slowly pushing our units forward like pawns taking a squares at a time. The arenas are mostly tight, in your face, and everything smashes into everything else. There is a kinetic frenzy to your moveset. You can bonk enemy units into each other, you can smash them into your other heroes, or you drop a freaking street light on their heads. It has the angles of billiard balls colliding. But also, you need to do careful calculations. It is not just that you bonk, but often the order of the bonking. The bad guys are usually much weaker than you, still have numbers on their side, reinforcements are almost always coming. You have a move limit, you have energy points, you have a limited deck of actions, this all requires a lot of thinking and care. Many turns can have huge momentum swings if you just play the cards right.
There is also a huge, terrifyingly complex economy in the background. While you're not bonking enemies, you have a secret club house full of heroes chilling, full of relationship opportunities, and other activities. You and Magik can go painting in the woods. Nearly every superhero has some kind of special task. So between every mission is this cycle of running around talking to the guys. There's the extremely married couple of Tony Stark and Dr. Strange in the basement who upgrade the facilities, there's Blade who does combat training, there's Captain Marvel who assigns units to side missions away from you, Spider-Man is in the shop, etc. etc. You're upgrading your cards, you're picking decks, you're upgrading units, you're optimizing all kinds of details. There's a million ways to decorate your room, there's side quests, there's a huge space to explore, you have a demon dog, you solve puzzles Midnight Suns is daunting. One wishes for a simpler system in the background. But also, I needed to do the loop of tasks every time. It is less chores and more chilling with all my buddies in this Northeast Sleepaway Camp full of heroes.
Just one more mission. That's the goal here: to make you lie to yourself and keep playing. One more task. One more part of the map to unlock.
Now there are flaws. Midnight Suns is very much a PC game in an era where everything has a console polish and finish. You can tell these characters were designed with the intention to be used in combat, not really in cutscenes. Every female character has the exact same body model. The physics of running around are not quite perfect. Sometimes conversations you see on the map will not trigger. Sometimes the specific tasks you need to do to get to the next part of the story are unclear. They ask you to create an OC-character, "The Hunter", who is also the most ridiculously overpowered character in the game. I could never get my Hunter's appearance exactly right, really wanted her to have an Eighties haircut but had to settle for a very Nineties perm.
Still, in an era where Marvel "realism" has become the default aesthetic for all superhero games, I'm glad to see Midnight Suns looking more like a comic book. Wolverine has his big goofy horn-mask complete with yellow spandex costume. All your cards are designed to create these double-page action shots, like Captain America jumping across the city to shield slam a guy in the face. Jake Solomon has admitted in Waypoint interviews that he's a huge Marvel dork, that's why he made this game. He wanted the big goofy set pieces, while also giving careful strategy and depth. Captain Marvel does not need cover, she can just punch things. So the aesthetic and the combat all work together in a really well-made game.
Midnight Suns was the best gaming experience I had in 2023. No game offered more depth in its combat, no game was more rewarding in learning all the depth. No game kept me on my toes, unleashing new challenges and new kinds of tactical puzzles every time I thought I had it all figured out. This game is decently long and fulfilling, plus there's a ton of DLC if you have room for seconds.
It was a big experimental swing, nobody has made a game like Midnight Suns before. And for that, Solomon was rewarded with having to find another job. We'll never get a Midnight Suns 2. In five years, this will be the kind of game that people will suddenly start asking "hey, that was cool, how come we never got another game like that?" The kind of game that podcasters pass around as little hobby horses they love and nobody else cares about. Oh well. If the world is too good to kick Venom in the face and have him smash into two of his goons, too good to hang with an X-Man in a bathing suit, then at least the world is thankfully a more serious and mature place than I thought. Right?
Right?
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