Marvel’s Midnight Suns developed by Firaxis was a dumpster fire of bugs and glitches on release. Quite frankly it wasn’t playable. Fortunately quite quickly after release many of the bugs that caused the game to crash were mostly patched out. Still, the game remains a mixed bag where sometimes it's completely unplayable or incredibly aggravating which is then contrasted by awesome moments of gameplay and an incredibly detailed story. Let's dive into the beautiful and trying mess that is Marvel’s Midnight Suns.

Story

The first thing I would say about Midnight Sun’s story is that every character has a detailed backstory and personality that you slowly discover and interact with as the game progresses. The story even intertwines with gameplay, awarding bonuses, skills, and features based on how you interact with teammates in downtime and your friendship with them.

Outside of the side story and world background you discover from talking to team members during downtime, the game's main story revolves around the player character ‘The Hunter’, yes that's their name. The Hunter's mother Lilith, a witch of the blood corrupted by the dark god Chthon, and her HYDRA forces are the story's main antagonists. The game starts after the Midnight Suns resurrect The Hunter from a death-like state. From there The Hunter joins the Midnight Suns and other Marvel heroes to fight Lilith and HYDRA as they try and take over the world. In between combat missions, The Hunter explores the grounds of the Midnight Suns' home base, The Abbey.

Gameplay

There are two main different types of gameplay in Midnight Suns. The primary gameplay mode is the combat missions where you choose three heroes from your current roster to go out and fight. Combat encounters are the most entertaining and attractive part of the game. The combat system is incredibly well-designed and polished, and even at launch when the game was buggy as hell, I never encountered bugs while in combat. It was clear that combat was where a lot of the QA testing had ended up, but it was done well.

Combat consists of the three chosen heroes facing off in randomly generated arenas against groups of opponents. Each hero has a list of attacks, skills, and abilities that upgrade and diversify as the game progresses. In combat, these abilities mix into a deck of cards that the player draws and plays with resources to fight the enemies in turn-based combat. The player can mix and match heroes to find their favorite combos and metas throughout the game.

The second part of the gameplay loop comes with the downtime portion of the game that occurs at the game hub world, ‘The Abbey’. There at the Midnight Sun’s HQ, the player discovers the story and talks with the other heroes. While at the Abbey the Player upgrades their character and other heroes as well as other progression and upkeep-related tasks. There are two sections of downtime at The Abbey, day and night. In the daytime before missions, the player can research tech, train, gather intel, and upgrade and level characters. At night the main focus is that players can explore the hub world and interact with the story.

Although at any time in the hub world the player can explore or interact with other characters. Interaction with the rest of the Midnight Suns is a huge part of the game, and earning friendship levels with other characters in the pseudo-dating game style of dialogue choices upgrades those characters' power in combat missions. Other than talking to other characters there is also an incredibly annoying part of downtime, that is repeatedly running all over the fairly large hub world to look for respawning herbs that are used for crafting and fetch quests. The herbs don’t respawn or evenly across the map so if you are serious about getting them that means running throughout the map looking for the hard-to-spot herbs every single day. The biggest problem with the Abbey sections of the game is that it is buggy as hell, and is where almost all the bugs and crashes happen.

Audio and Visuals

There are two sides to the audio and visuals of Midnight Suns. The first side is that of the combat missions which look and sound awesome, they are animated with incredible detail, and run astoundingly smooth. The particle effects and environments are created beautifully. Then we come to the hellhole that is the hub world. There are an incredible number of visual bugs whenever you are at the Abbey, let alone the bad graphics. That’s a slight hyperbole, the graphics can look amazing at times in the hub world, but then terrible at others. Sometimes grass will look grated or the world will stutter as the player runs through it. Just so many visual bugs.

That brings us to the conversation scenes. The dialogue syncing was not done well, at all. The uncanny valley is very much present, in addition, the character's mouths never match up to the dialogue. Also, there are problems with getting the dialogue to start, there is a regular problem where characters will just stop talking for a few seconds, or the dialogue won't play despite the text appearing. I will say however that when the dialogue does work the voice acting and writing are all extremely high quality.

Replayability

The replayability for Midnight Suns is pretty high up there. For one, the player character has two different sets of abilities, light or dark to focus on as well as correlating conversation options to match. Aside from that while you will play with all of your hero roster in a playthrough you can really only give two or three heroes the most attention, which allows other playthroughs to focus on different main party compositions to try out different hero combinations and strategies. There are also multiple difficulty levels to choose from that unlock throughout the game. In addition to the plain replayability, the game has tons of content lasting players 20-40 hours for just one very quick playthrough. Overall the replayablity for Midnight Suns is promising as the combat at least never gets old.

What It Could Have Done Better

Just so many things could have been done better, first and foremost the game could have been done with another month of QA and quality testing at least. As of writing this, it’s been two and a half weeks since release and the hub world is still full of glitches and bugs even if it isn’t crashing every five seconds anymore. The gameplay loop of the hub world could also have been slimed down, it is incredibly annoying to run through the map every in-game day to look for more herbs for crafting and story quests. Also while the graphics of the combat portion look great a lot of the hub world feels lacking in comparison, especially some of the character models and outfits. So much of the hub world is a complete mess it just emphasizes how utterly amazing and perfect the combat portion of the game is.

Verdict

In all honesty, I can’t wait until modders can get their hands on the game because there are so many quality-of-life mods I want right now. While the combat system of Midnight Suns may be perfect, the other half of the game in the hub world is not, and that constitutes a rather large portion of the game and almost all of the story. In general, I would say that Marvel’s Midnight Suns is one of those games that is an incredible experience to play repeatedly, but you really should wait until after a few months of patches, or when modders fix some issues and then get it while it's on sale. In the end with all the bugs, glitches, and other issues, despite the amazing combat I have to give Marvel’s Midnight Suns a 7/10 and that’s being generous.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is available on PC via Steam and Epic Games, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. Launch timing for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch versions of the game will be shared at a later date.