Marvel's Midnight Suns Review
Still, that's not to say I felt equally as good about every aspect of Midnight Suns as there's some general lack of polish that seems to be holding the game back from true greatness. Aspects like the Abbey exploration I could have done without entirely as traipsing around the empty grounds solving puzzles as challenging as "use the skill on the icon matching the same skill" felt completely empty alongside the depth of the combat in the game. You only ever need venture out to harvest supplies for sidequests making every step away from the Mirror Table an elongated "fetch this" experience. Yawn.
Similarly, while some character dialogue is handled perfectly (such as every line by Yuri Lowenthal's reprised Spider-Man) other times things can feel wooden and hollow or even worse, can feel like the lines were written by a suite of execs trying to be cool. Not everyone has to have quips guys, put away the Joss Whedon Quip-laser. Even rougher than these moments are the graphics, which can range from looking utterly brilliant when it comes to particle effects, to looking straight out of a mobile game when your character lifts their arms and their bodies morph into shapes that imply their spine has muscles beefier than their biceps.
It creates the impression that this is a game of two halves; one of a deeply enriching story and brilliant combat system, and the other being a high-school rom-com written by your dad and animated using the leftovers from WWE 2K22, with the soundtrack from "generic fantasy game #025" over the top. Thankfully graphics have never been a sticking point for me personally but I can see some people complaining about the lack of overall polish here.
What I do worry about however is the future of this game, and how the state it is in now might change drastically over the coming weeks and months.
It's not been uncommon for publishers to change elements of their online marketplaces after the review window, and there are too many red flags within the moment-to-moment gameplay for me to not at least pose a word of warning. Each time you complete a mission you're rewarded with cores that unlock randomized cards for your team, and you use different forms of currency to buy cosmetic upgrades, enhance abilities, and craft new cards. I feel that the ways in which these are set up is implying heavily that certain packs of these in-game currencies will make their way to the marketplace in the future, as it seems almost perfectly geared toward doing so.
We've already lived through publishers telling us their titles won't have anything for sale outside of cosmetics and then redacting this philosophy, and I'd be foolish to assume that this wouldn't happen again.
At present, you can only buy character skins, but who's to say this won't change in the near future, and if this happens it will change the way the game plays entirely. Abilities will be bought, heroes will be buffed, and rewards for nonpaying players could be lowered and that will make the game so much less challenging for some, and much less fun for everyone else. Please don't let this brilliant, if slightly rough around the edges, title become a villain origin story. It deserves better than that.
And hey if I'm wrong, I'm glad to take the L.
As an overall package (at the current time of writing) Midnight Suns is a title that blazes bright with excellent ideas, a charming (if clunky) social system, and a brilliant suite of characters that I can't wait to see more of in upcoming adventures.
Rating: ★★★★