For a game featuring some of the most famous characters in pop culture, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is full of bold choices. Its story is based on a ‘90s comic event that no one - including many comic book fans - has ever heard of, and its roster is made up of heroes that were neither part of the original story, nor well known today. Half of Midnight Suns is a tactics game, but instead of adapting the traditional turn-based strategy XCOM creator Firaxis is known for, it uses a hybrid deck-building system unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Boldest of all, the other half is a life-sim/visual novel about the day-to-day drama of living with 12 temperamental superheroes. There’s no part of this that could be considered ‘playing it safe.’

It’s hard not to compare Midnight Suns to Marvel’s Avengers, a game that chased every trend and industry buzzword, yet ended up being little more than a facade for its in-game marketplace. In many ways, Midnight Suns is the antithesis of the kind of soulless, market-analyzed, mass-appeal, quadruple-A product that makes up such a large portion of the landscape today. It pursues a vision - one made of seemingly disparate parts and strange ideas - and succeeds at practically every turn.

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Summing up the plot of Midnight Suns is deceptively difficult. On the surface, it’s just another day, another apocalypse in the Marvel universe. Lilith, the mother of demons, seeks the Darkhold in order to summon her master, the elder god Cthon, who intends to devour the Earth as elder gods are wont to do. Standing in her way are the Avengers, a young team of supernatural heroes called the Midnight Suns, and Lilith’s only child, The Hunter, who died some three centuries prior in a battle with Lilith, but has now been resurrected to fight her again.

That’s the short version. Midnight Suns’ 60+ hour campaign is far more layered than any comic event or Marvel movie could ever be. The Hunter is both a character with a complicated history and an important role to play in saving the world, as well as a proxy for you to interact, influence, and ingratiate yourself with Earth’s mightiest. Though the story is entirely linear, how you choose to shape The Hunter’s personality, what relationships you nurture, and the choices you make as the leader of this unconventional team all serve to tell a version of the story that is wholly unique to you. There’s only one way the major events of Midnight Sun’s prophetic plot can unfold, but you have control over how you react to each event - and how you react to the way other characters react - which ultimately leads to a far more grounded, engaging, and personal experience than the typical ‘branching path’ style of choice-based games.

One of its greatest strengths is its ability to both make you identify with The Hunter and, in turn, make you feel like you’re an active participant in the story. That’s a rare feat for any game, but Midnight Suns makes it seem effortless.

Another one of its storytelling strengths is how well it balances its massive cast of characters. Each of the 12 heroes plays an important role, and none of them ever feel superfluous or out of place. They all have their own insecurities, their own problems to solve, and their own relationships with the other heroes, and the story takes its time exploring all of it in an organic way. Everyone has a complete arc, both as individuals and as members of the team. Even characters that don’t have much history together in other Marvel media are given fleshed out and believable relationships.

When it comes to The Hunter, the foundation of every relationship they form comes from commonalities they have with each hero. Blade first bonds with The Hunter because they’re both demon slayers with preternaturally long lives, Captain America because they were both brought back to life in a time they struggle to relate to, Nico because they both have mothers that tried to kill them, and so on for the entire cast. Remarkably, The Hunter somehow manages to connect and intersect with fundamental characteristics of every hero on the team. Increasing your friendship level with each hero improves their battle effectiveness and eventually unlocks their ultimate Midnight Suns ability, but I found the act of building these relationships was an even stronger motivator than the pursuit of power - something I never expected to say. The longer I played, the more invested in those relationships and storylines I became.

So much of Midnight Suns’ life-sim experience is self-guided and optional, meaning you can largely skip through the dialogue to get to the fights if you really want to. In the 80 hours it took me to finish my first campaign, I was never once tempted to skip a single conversation, less I miss out on an important piece of character development or details about one of Midnight Suns’ many mysteries. I enjoyed exploring the abbey and spending time getting to know the heroes as much as, if not more than, the actual combat.

Occasionally, the visuals can get in the way of the story. In conversation, characters have a stiff, Fallout-like quality that can sometimes make them feel lifeless. During heated or dramatic moments, the disconnect between the dialogue and the lack of emotion in the physicality of the characters can undermine the vocal performances. Distracting camera behavior in cutscenes and strange visual bugs are not uncommon, both at the abbey and in combat missions. There’s a better version of this game in theory, with an infinite budget and film-quality motion capture that brings every scene to life. Midnight Suns is understandably limited, given the length and scope of its script, so just the fact that every line is voice acted is impressive enough. Still, it's sometimes hard to ignore the factors of practicality that impede its ambition. Of course, with a bigger budget, it would also be far less likely to take any risks at all.

It’s also difficult not to talk about Midnight Suns as if it's two different games - the life-sim and the tactical strategy game - but both sides feed into the same friendship, morality, and progression systems. The skills of the heroes you bring into battle are somewhat defined by your relationships with them, which creates an even stronger bond between you and the other characters. Ability synergies can be powerful, but fighting alongside your closest friends will always give you the biggest advantage, regardless of their individual powers. That creates a strong incentive to develop your relationships, but also to put a lot of thought into how you approach each mission. Your time off the battlefield making friends, training, and building your deck have as much to do with your success as the choices you make in battle. This is one of the many ways that Midnight Suns successfully overlaps its themes with its gameplay.

While deckbuilding adds a layer of random chance, Midnight Suns’ combat is no less strategic or satisfying than XCOM’s or any other tactical RPG, but it is different. Planning multiple turns in advance is important, and while you have full knowledge of what your enemies will do each turn, you don’t know what abilities you’ll have access to on the next. To maintain an advantage, you have to understand what each hero's strengths are, and what each team is capable of doing together. With 286 combinations of three-person teams each with their own decks that constantly evolve, that’s a lot easier said than done. That moving target is what keeps the combat fresh and interesting for the entire 60-hour campaign, and beyond. Whether a hero has strong movement abilities, environment attacks, support moves, or just raw strength, they all rely on each other to a much further degree than the teams in any other tactics game. There’s no better feeling than pulling off a perfectly efficient turn where every hero gets to do what they’re best at. If you’re considerate about preparing your heroes and putting the right ones together, you get to have moments like that all the time.

It takes a while for that bigger picture to come into focus, but right away the moment-to-moment action feels fantastic. Every ability gets its own dynamic camera move paired with an attack that feels appropriately powerful. Knocking enemies across the arena to collide with each other or into obstacles is always satisfying, and creating big chain reactions by using the right combination of moves makes you feel like a genius. Cover isn’t a mechanic - it would feel unnatural for superheroes - but there’s a greater emphasis on positioning both your heroes and your enemies, as well as plenty of opportunities to use the environment as weapons. The theme and the form align every time you stack up multiple targets for a big Iron Man repulsor blast, or and have Spider-Man pull a streetlight down on an enemy’s head with his webs.

You only have a limited amount of card plays, redraws, movements, and power, so you’re meant to approach each turn like a puzzle to solve. Figuring out how to get the most out of the actions available to you is core to any tactics game, and Midnight Suns does that better than any other. At the same time, there’s always room for high risk, high reward plays. You can carefully position your team and attack your enemies with perfect predictability, but every once in a while you might just feel the need to take a 30 percent chance to push someone off of a cliff. Battles are neither rigid nor totally chaotic, but instead strike a perfect balance of the two.

The way each hero’s power set is expressed through their cards and their unique passive abilities feels both thoughtful and balanced. Each one has completely unique mechanics and playstyles, and while some are more immediately beneficial than others - like Wolverine’s ability to heal himself every time you redraw one of his cards - they all come online in the right situation. There are no weak characters, just situations they’re weak in, and as you progress you will learn to identify and prepare for those situations better. You have to learn and use the entire team throughout the campaign, and the more time you spend fighting with each hero, the more skilled you’ll become as a commander.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns won’t be for everyone. A 60-hour campaign that’s at least half made up of talking to Spider-Man about his feelings is going to turn off even some of the biggest Marvel (or at least MCU) fans, and the combat, despite its cinematic qualities, isn’t exactly God of War. But its limited appeal is also its greatest strength. In a sea of blockbuster open-world and third-person action games, it was a delight to play something so clearly driven by passion for these characters and this kind of gameplay. Something like this could only come from a team that deeply understands and respects the Marvel heroes as much as they understand and respect turn-based strategy games. While it's undeniably a quirky mash-up of cards, tactics, and dating sims, Midnight Suns is a focused, well-structured, and fully realized experience. It doesn’t try to please everyone, but if you’re willing to go along for the ride, you’ll find a tactics game that shakes the foundation of the entire genre, along with one of the most compelling Marvel stories ever told.

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