Marvel’s Midnight Suns introduces The Hunter – a bespoke character that Firaxis Games designed with Marvel – who has been resurrected by the other Midnight Suns to help in the battle against Lilith. They are fully customizable, both in terms of appearance and playstyle with a range of abilities to choose from, offering good damage options and healing for your team. It’s balanced beautifully, and I constantly felt the desire to learn more about where the stories being told were going. It’s the Marvel video game equivalent of a comic book saga omnibus you can’t stop reading. That’s perhaps the highest compliment I could pay Midnight Suns because it’s what’s been missing up to this point in Marvel games. This can involve sparring with your teammates to train both of you up for the battles to come or researching artifacts to help build vital kit around The Abbey. There’s also places to explore on the grounds with items to unearth throughout the grounds. Yet the crux of Midnight Suns’ hub world is hanging out with your teammates. Hang Out With Your Favourite Superheroes While the exhilaration of the card system is regularly reinforced, this contrasts with the dull overarching narrative. The pitch: A demon named Lilith teams up with the perennial evil organization Hydra to threaten the world. On the opposing side, the Midnight Suns are a group of young misfits led by a veteran hero simply named Caretaker. The story has obvious parallels to Professor Xavier and the X-Men, and this undercuts the novelty it sometimes earns elsewhere. But while the plot itself may be slipshod, the focus on the personal stories of the heroes holed up in the abbey, the game’s hub, creates a spark and propels things forward.

One objective you can complete while exploring the Abbey as Hunter is to collect all the Marvel's Midnight Suns Elemental Rods and place them in an altar When it comes to the console version of the game, however, you simply don’t have this problem. Of course, like most PC ports, Marvel’s Midnight Suns has the potential to look better on a powerful PC than it does on a console. However, this is increasingly becoming less frequent when you consider the power of next-gen machines like the PS5 and Xbox Series X. On both of these platforms, Marvel’s Midnight Suns looks stunning – and you really don’t need to push the graphics further. Going into Midnight Suns it was clear it would be a bit of a departure from the kind of Marvel games we’ve had in recent years (well, except maybe Marvel Snap) and from the kind of game Firaxis usually makes. The initial reveal screamed ‘XCOM but Marvel’ and that turned out not to be quite the case. The first thing to clear up is that this turn-based strategy game is not, in fact, XCOM. You don’t micromanage positioning, you don’t face constant roster turnover, and you don’t hold your breath riding the thin line of shooting percentages. Overwatch isn’t a thing and sound tactical maneuvering doesn’t exist. Instead, all of the trade-offs, tension, and gnashing of teeth are framed around a hand of cards. My opinion of Midnight Suns drastically changed as the card pool grew and I was able to string together six- and seven-card plays in a single turn

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review (PS5) – Firaxis Works its Magic on the Marvel Universe

Instead this is a turn-based RPG with a card-based battle system. There’s plenty of XCOM D.N.A. bubbling under the surface of this combo, and it starts to boil over as you get deeper into this 60-hour saga. The meat of it though, is refreshing.

On top of all this, when it actually comes to playing the game itself, Firaxis Games has made sure that the experience is as easy as it can be on consoles. The Hunter also serves as the player character for exploring the Abbey (the Midnight Suns’ base of operations) between missions. Here, you’ll be able to engage in the game’s RPG aspects by chatting with your team of heroes and initiating Hangouts in the evenings to build up your friendships. You can even explore the Abbey Grounds and complete various quests and mysteries - keep an eye out for Arcane Keys in Marvel's Midnight Suns too. That coupled with a bunch of smaller visual bugs and the feeling the game was suffering under the weight of its own data the deeper I got, greatly soured an otherwise fantastic experience. It’s not the first time either, as the PS4 version of XCOM 2 had an even more acute variant of these issues alongside hefty slowdown. Midnight Suns generally moves along a lot smoother, but it’s disappointing have trouble with the game in this manner. This world-threatening event brings together The Avengers, such as Iron Man and Captain America, and the Midnight Suns, who consist of a magic and supernatural-based heroes such as Blade, Magik, and Ghost Rider. But they need someone to unite them. Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review (PS5) – Firaxis Works its Magic on the Marvel UniverseWhen forming a team, it’s crucial that you have at least one character that can generate Heroism and another character that can use a lot of it - without Heroism, you won’t be able to use some of your heroes’ most powerful abilities that can really turn the tide of a combat encounter. Also consider following a fairly standard Tank-Support-Damage hero format so that you’ve got a selection of well-rounded abilities and status effects for any fight. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a tactical RPG based in the Marvel universe. Story-wise, it’s a very loose re-telling of a story arc from the comics called “Midnight Sons.” In it, the evil organization Hydra has summoned Demon Queen Lilith, who starts turning various Marvel heroes and villains into her very own minions. This, though, isn’t quite the most important factor when it comes to what makes Marvel’s Midnight Suns a strategy game that’s better on consoles. The one thing that really matters is performance, and the console version of Marvel’s Midnight Suns runs ten times better than the PC port – even when played on some of the lowest graphics settings. The battles hold so many variables and uncertainties that it never got old lining up goons to boot into an explosive fissure or launching debris at their heads. While the deadly nature of XCOM’s combat made for despair-inducing drama, the safer approach of Midnight Suns isn’t without drama and tension. Instead of being killed, heroes are downed, with two shots at reviving them per mission. Let the heroes get too battered and they incur injuries that hamper their abilities for a couple of in-game days, effectively shelving them in a similar manner to XCOM’s injury system. You may not be able to lose heroes permanently, but your faves can end up out of commission just when you need them most.