Marvel's Midnight Suns Review

Speaking of action, this game's combat system is outstanding. Gone are the XCOM "99% chance to hit leading to a miss" moments, as here heroes hit hard, and hit all the time. This means the game becomes about positioning, using environmental attacks and chaining attacks together to extend what should be a "three-card plays per turn" experience into a rolling rampage of destruction that can last well beyond that.

For someone like me who plays a lot of Magic The Gathering, I felt at home within the first few battles, and was deeply entrenched some twenty hours later. As the player can completely customize each hero's deck, which is comprised of eight cards, you can implement certain builds in order to create some insanely powerful team combos.

For example, Dr. Strange's cards often do more damage or come with secondary effects based on how much Heroism you have (a resource that's built during battles that can be spent to activate more powerful cards), and so pairing him with Spider-Man who's playstyle revolves around quick card drawing attacks and building Heroism made for quick access to Stephen Strange's secret arsenal.

Playing around with character combos felt fun and invigorating, especially as the game simply doesn't let you stick to the same team over and over by tying certain missions to certain heroes, asking you to bring specific characters along to complete side quests/requests, and of course having the enemies absolutely butcher them causing them to become wounded.

On the higher difficulties (which you unlock by doing well at missions) injuries and team wipes can happen in an instant and so careful planning, positioning, and knowing when to ditch certain powerful cards in an attempt to draw a less damaging but potentially more useful card is key. This game takes no prisoners but thanks to the mitigation of percentages to hit, never felt as brutally unfair as XCOM could at times, and as such, I never once went back to base salty at a defeat.

To close my point on the combat, I was genuinely shocked to see how, even at the thirty and forty-hour mark that I was still unlocking new skills and finding new combos to play, which showcases a real understanding of how to craft a brilliant combat system. In some card games, you'll find your key players and that'll be you set in stone forever, which can obviously make the passion dwindle over time.

Here though? Well, I was tweaking decks right up to the final battle, and it felt great.