Marvel's Midnight Suns

Firaxis Games earned its reputation on cold arithmetic. This is the studio behind XCOM, a series famous for making strategy players scream at a 95%-to-hit shot that missed. So when the team announced a Marvel game built on decks of cards, the skepticism was fair. Superheroes and probability tables don’t obviously mix, and the last decade is littered with licensed games that treated a beloved IP as a marketing skin stretched over a hollow loop.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is not that. It’s a card-based tactical RPG, published by 2K, that takes the demonic corners of Marvel lore — Lilith, the elder god Chthon, Blade and the Midnight Suns — and turns them into an ambitious hybrid. You play as The Hunter, a customizable hero resurrected specifically to stop your own mother, the aforementioned mother of demons. It’s melodramatic in the way comics have always been melodramatic, and the game commits to it fully.

The market positioning is the interesting part. This isn’t an Avengers brawler chasing live-service dollars, and it isn’t a movie tie-in. It’s a lengthy, unapologetically single-player campaign — dozens of hours of turn-based combat braided with a social-sim hub called the Abbey, where you build friendships with Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and a rotating cast expanded by post-launch DLC heroes like Deadpool, Venom, Morbius, and Storm.

Launched on Steam on December 1, 2022 at $59.99, it arrived with a clear identity: a brilliant core wrapped in a divisive shell, and where a player lands on it depends almost entirely on how much patience they have for hanging out at the Abbey between fights.

• Card-Driven Tactical Combat: Every hero fights from a personal deck of ability cards. No hit-percentage roulette — outcomes are deterministic, and mastery comes from sequencing, resource management, and reading the board.
• The Abbey Social Sim: A hub where you deepen relationships with your roster. Friendships unlock combat passives, new cards, and story beats, turning downtime into a progression engine.
• Deep RPG Progression: Upgrade and combine cards, research gear, customize The Hunter’s playstyle and cosmetic look, and reshape your deck as your roster expands.
• Environmental Combos: The battlefield is a weapon. Knock enemies into hazards, throw objects, and reposition for chained kills that feel choreographed rather than calculated.

The Gameplay Loop

The headline here: the combat is built around readable tension, and it works. Firaxis threw out the one mechanic most associated with its own name — the to-hit roll — and the design is liberating. When you commit to a play in Midnight Suns, you know what happens. The uncertainty isn’t whether your attack lands; it’s whether you’ve built the right sequence of cards, spent your limited actions wisely, and left yourself positioned for next turn.

Each round hands you a small hand of cards and a tight budget of resources: card plays, a “redraw” to cycle your hand, and “move” actions for repositioning heroes across the arena. Every card is a decision, and every turn is a small logic puzzle. Do you play the cheap attack to bank a redraw and dig for your combo piece? Do you shove an enemy off a ledge with an environmental play that costs no card resource at all? The system rewards greed and punishes sloppiness in equal measure, and when a turn clicks — a Spider-Man web-throw setting up a Wolverine finisher that chains into a knockback into a gas canister — it delivers the specific electric satisfaction only good tactics games manage.

Crucially, the deckbuilding gives the whole thing legs. You don’t run a static loadout. As heroes level and friendships grow, their card pools expand, and you’re constantly pruning, upgrading, and combining cards to sharpen your three-hero squad. This is where the RPG and deckbuilder DNA fuse cleanly with the tactics. The build variety is real, and higher difficulties demand you actually engage with it.

The Abbey Problem

Then there’s the Abbey. Between missions, the game leaves the battlefield and becomes a supernatural summer-camp counselor. You walk — slowly — around a gothic hub, chat with heroes, hand out gifts, go on hangouts, and manage a relationship meter that gates real mechanical bonuses. When it works, it’s disarmingly charming. Watching Blade and Captain Marvel bicker, or catching a quiet character beat, humanizes a roster that most Marvel games treat as action figures.

When it doesn’t work, it’s friction dressed as content. The movement is sluggish by design. The fetch-and-chat rhythm gets repetitive. The pacing sags hard in the back half, where the dialogue starts recycling and the loop between “great fight” and “wander the grounds doing errands” begins to feel like a tax on the part of the game players actually came for. Some adore this connective tissue. Others will resent every minute the Abbey keeps them from the next battle. Both camps have a point, which is the honest verdict here: the social sim is the single biggest variable in whether someone loves this game or merely respects it.

The Story

Give Firaxis credit for swinging. The narrative is earnest, occasionally cheesy, and far more invested in character than the plot strictly requires — and it’s better for that investment. The Hunter’s personal stake against Lilith gives the campaign a spine, and the friendship system, for all its pacing sins, pays real emotional dividends by the finale. It’s not subtle. It’s not trying to be. It’s a comic book, and it knows it.

The art direction leans into a moody, occult-tinged take on the Marvel universe — dark abbeys, glowing sigils, and hero designs that split the difference between comics and cinematic realism. It’s stylish, if not always cutting-edge; some environments look flatter than the character models deserve. The combat presentation, though, is where the money went. Card plays trigger cinematic camera swoops and dramatic finishers that sell the fantasy of superheroic violence without slowing the flow to a crawl.

The UI is a standout — no small feat for a game juggling cards, resources, positioning, and status effects simultaneously. Information is legible, the card interface is clean, and the tutorialization eases players through genuine mechanical complexity without drowning them. Voice acting is broadly strong across a huge cast, and the score does its job. As for performance, a turn-based tactics game of this scope is light on hardware demands, though the Abbey’s hub structure — with its frequent loading and slow traversal — is heavier than a hub of its size should be.

On Steam, this is the version built for. Mouse-and-keyboard is a natural fit for a card game: hovering to inspect, click-dragging plays, and snapping the camera around the battlefield all suit a pointer in a way controllers can’t quite match. The card-and-grid design was clearly built with a pointer in mind, and PC players get the sharpest visuals and easy access to the full slate of DLC heroes. Controller support is competent if you’d rather lean back — the interface adapts gracefully — but the mouse remains king for the fiddly, information-dense turns where speed matters. The one persistent gripe is the Abbey’s traversal, which no input method fully rescues.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is two games sharing one disc. One is a genuinely inventive tactical card battler — arguably Firaxis’s most interesting combat system since it reinvented XCOM. The other is a well-meaning but overlong friendship simulator that will test the patience of the very strategists the combat attracts. That tension keeps it from greatness, but it remains one of the smarter surprises in the Marvel catalog. We recommend it to the right audience: buy it for the fights, tolerate the Abbey, and the trade is worth making.