Bottom Line: Firaxis built a tactical combat system so sharp it belongs in the strategy hall of fame — then wrapped it in a friendship-simulator that alternately deepens and drags down one of the most surprising Marvel games ever made.
The Gameplay Loop
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you pick this up: the combat is a masterpiece of readable tension. Firaxis threw out the one mechanic most associated with its own name — the to-hit roll — and the result 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 produces the specific electric joy that only great tactics games deliver.
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 into something lethal. 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, you leave the battlefield and become 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. 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 you actually came for. Some players adore this connective tissue. Others will resent every minute the Abbey keeps them from the next battle. Both camps are right, which is the honest verdict here: the social sim is the single biggest variable in whether you love this game or merely respect 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.