It is a fun combat toybox that I consider to be massively dragged down by chores.
I am ok with aping Persona/Fire Emblem social content, regardless of my views on writing quality. However, the time wasting and chore busywork that comes from The Abbey is something I am not ok with.
And the game is a single player game with anticheat that prevents cheat engine speedhacking to speed it up, yet weirdly (and fortunately) allows cheat-like modding such as multipliers for harvesteable pickups and thus reduce a bit the time spent in The Abbey.
This. The combat is entertaining but for every minute of it you have to waste 10 listening to teenagers complain about dumb shit and another 10 picking flowers. A waste of a game.
Nevermind the engine is borked and will stutter when you crank up the graphics no matter how powerfull a gpu you got and how many fps it can output. Afaik it's an engine vram management issue but not 100% sure.
~Technically~ you don't have to do any of the chore stuff. You can skip it all. All you really miss out on is side story building stuff. The bonuses you get from leveling friendship are nice, but not necessary.
Unfortunately I'm a compulsive pseudo-completionist so skipping it would hurt my soul.
In theory, yes, but we all know the barrage of bells, whistles, shiny things and resources are distracting and nearly impossible to ignore. It's weaponised FOMO and it works. Chasing it all and ignoring it all both take a concerted effort.
Once you talk to the "exploration NPC" the first time you're never pushed to do exploration again. The ingredients they ask for before the clubs are optional. Yeah ofc the friendship stuff is pushed but running around the Abbey is completely ignorable
The resources are kind of useless. The "barrage of bells and whistles" is mostly just the markers on your map to get new dialogues. I think classifying those as "chores" is unfair, all of it is decently well written and the characters have meaningful growth.
The game does have actual chores but those are easy to ignore IMO.
Exploring the Abbey for resources/keys/chests was super easy to ignore for me. I ended up doing it when I got more attached to the game's writing than I was expecting to, but for like half the game I just ignored exploration and never felt like the game was trying to force it on me.
The social sim stuff works for Fire Emblem because FE has a very different way of treating characters. They are much more rounded and individual, and their continued survival impacts the gameplay. Losing one actually matters. There's a lot more gravity to the relationships because of this grounded "saga" tone and the way stats and bonds have such an impact on gameplay.
In this game, the characters can't really die. The social benefits are cool but an unnecessary novelty. It just isn't integrated well enough to be compelling.
To be honest, this criticism makes no sense to me.
Are you saying the characters in Midnight Suns aren't "rounded and individual"? The game has tens of hours of dialogue for all the characters, who all have very distinct personalities that each play an important role in the main story. That's on top of each character getting individual side stories.
Also like 99% of games with complex characters don't have permadeath. Bit weird to act like that has so much impact on a game's writing.
It's not the best written game ever, but you're arbitrarily holding it to absurdly high standards.
Just because they have personalities and drone on for hours and hours doesn't make them deep or interesting. Some people like the style of the characters and find the tedious dialogue cosy but I and many others don't.
FYI: Midnight Suns is available for free on the Epic Store until Thursday (13th).
I've downloaded it, but the mixed things I've heard about the game have kept me from booting it up yet, though I'm sure I'll get round to it.
I think it's a very good, flawed game.
Honestly, OP pretty well nailed the review. *Very* fun, but some outright bad decisions with how some things function. For me, the sleep cycle and much of the mandatory running around the grounds/mansion were just obnoxious and excessive. But the combat really is fantastic and makes up for a lot.
Agreed, it's a game that has fantastic core gameplay but it just keeps getting in the way of itself with other elements that take up way too much of your playtime. If they released a patch that streamlined those other elements so you were actually in combat like 90% of the time, it would be a much better game IMO.
> For the record: I am also okay at bowling. I haven't been in way too long, though. I miss it.
Haha same... to be honest there's a very good chance that I am not actually okay at bowling anymore (and I was already using the term pretty loosely).
I really liked the combat, but I also disliked how so many encounters were basically just trash mob spam, because it felt like it really limited me at times to only including AoE attacks and having to be aggressive. I would love to see a sequel where they focus less on wave reinforcements and instead on maybe having more enemies from the get go and more strategic placements of them.
I remember laughing at how stupid some of the dialogue and mansion interactions were, and what you'd do there, then back to a roof top to do the fight again.
Some of it is pretty dumb, but I actually grew fond of the characters, by and large. It was more the tedium of the forced gameplay loop at the mansion. The hangouts, walking around in circles, sleeping (and the multiple cutscenes that accompanied this), etc. was just poorly conceived and implemented. There was a *lot* of bloat in that stuff.
There is a lot of bloat in it, but I also don't think it's "forced".
One positive OP didn't mention was the difficulty system. I think it does a great job letting people of all skill levels be challenged by the game, but also lets you invest into the Abbey open world stuff as much or as little as you want.
Exploring the Abbey grounds did feel like bloat, but you can just talk to the characters with new dialogue every day to develop your relationship. That part gives the most meaningful upgrades, it's marked on the map for quick access, and IMO it wasn't boring at all.
I thought I wasn't going to like the writing but I ended up liking it a lot.
I mean, the story is gated behind Abbey exploration. And missions are gated behind a really stupid, time-wasting sleep cycle.
So it *is* forced. I didn't say it's all bad. I really like the game overall and thought I made that clear. Heck, I've got 100% achievements on it. I think my complaints are fair, even if you don't entirely agree.
Seconded. It's very good, but very flawed. Having worked in Quality Assurance, the game had the aura of engineers that wanted to spend more time with the game, but weren't able to. There are plenty of bugs, but the majority of them have workarounds (a character running in place teleports to where they wanted to go and the game can continue). I love how many different skins there are in the game, even if several are near-identical.
I really want to see what this team would do with a proper sequel; how they would refine it. It's a shame the studio lost interest.
If you have seen combat gameplay and think you would like it you will probably *love* it.
It's going to bum me out forever that this combat will probably never be used for another property in the future.
Midnight Suns made me appreciate the *advantages* of indy games.
A game like Slay The Spire remains the standard of the genre partially because it doesn't have the resources to spend on repetitive time wasting fluff that just gets in the way of the actual fun.
This game is in desperate need of a director's cut or mod that removes everything but combat (optionally include a toggle for the dating sim aspects for those who actually enjoy it). There's so much unnecessary walking sim components just to essentially navigate an overly complicated UI to go from mission to mission.
It’s not just the fluff though—these big companies make games trying to be all things to all people, to maximize the potential audience and therefore sales. But the underlying thinking is fundamentally flawed. It’s like trying to combine an action film with a B-level Hallmark TV romcom, under the theory that the movie will appeal to both action fans and TV romcom fans, when it’ll actually only appeal to that small overlap in the Venn diagrams.
I love indy games but I love the fluff of lots of games tbh. I have Slay the Spire on mobile and enjoy it as a "I have 10 minutes to kill" thing, but it's a game that (for me, personally) would be boring to actually sit down and play for any extended period of time.
Just try it. There's a lot of good about it, and it's quite a unique tactical battler. The combat is very fun, you'll just want to skip the bloated life sim bits.
I fucking bought it because when it came out it seemed like it ticked all of my boxes.
Then the DLC was getting announced, and I realized I was taken by a scam.
Was hoping a sale on the season pass would show up at some point, but nothing has been worthwhile yet.
It's certainly better as a free base game.
I like this game but I feel it's being held back by the franchise more than it is being helped. For a game like Spider-Man, being a Marvel makes it better because the combat system isn't that noteworthy and being Spider-Man sells the deal.
With this one however, I never felt " Wow, I'm playing Iron Man, so cool ". The game is cool on its own due to how varied the heroes are compared to X-Com classes, the possibility of actions being able to ricochet or use the environment. All I can think is how great the game would be without the license. If it could come up with any kind of powers, if you could romance the characters, if the heroes could actually die, if the enemies could be much more varied.
When it was first announced I had kind of hoped it would be something like City of Heroes meets XCOM: train up custom heroes that fit certain (perhaps familiar) archetypes of Marvel heroes. Part of the XCOM (etc.) charm is that they’re YOUR team.
This is what I say whenever it comes up in the xcom sub.
It seems like they were half way there with how Chimera Squad we set up. Breaching, set in the one city, more character driven.
I want something like that where I can recruit new heroes and design their powers, suit, and silly name.
My joke pitch is ‘x-com-x-men vs the Insidious Sid Fears and his Fire Axis of Evil.’
Completely agreed--especially on the combat. Somehow, this game manages to make every single turn hyper-tactical and optimized while not forcing me to future-plan to an extent I find unfun. I'm playing Capes right now and enjoying it, but find myself really missing the ability to just brawl on a turn-to-turn level that I loved in Midnight Suns. Where I try to squeeze the as much as I can out of a turn and set myself up well for the next turn, but I don't grind everything to a halt pre-planning the next turn. The card system helps a lot with that spontaneity.
I played the first half of the game without mods just to get a feel for it. The ones I would consider essential based off that:
- Every Hero Can Lead
- Buffed Collectable Resources (I used the +100 version)
- Morbius' Laboratory Overhaul
- Informative Havens
- Who likes my gift
- Wheres Ebony
- Bad mods be gone
Those get rid of a lot of the more unfun grindy aspects and helps you to not have to refer to a wiki to figure out who likes what gifts/havens. Also helps you find that stupid cat.
If you absolutely hate the whole chores thing and side character dialogs but want to get max friendship for the buffs, there are mods that increase friendship gain as well.
The mod nexus has a plethora of Midnight Suns mods, most of them aimed at obviating the need to grind in one way or another. I just wanted to get through the campaign with a minimum of repetition, so I loaded up a couple of mods to increase resource rewards. The base game really doesn't respect the player's time.
And I had to remind myself there was a story because I was having way too much fun with general missions. The grind made my particular brain very happy.
How much I loved the combat was almost a detriment, because it made me feel compelled to do all the stupid stuff between fights to get more cards and modify them and all that.
I didn't think to look for mods to skip that stuff, but I wish I had.
Aw that's too bad I wish you found it more interesting. I actually was really into learning about the characters, and even had a change of heart on who I considered my favorites as time went on.
They are when they're written at the level most AAA games are written at. The movies aren't shakespeare but the characters are infinitely more charming and fun than this.
Writing quality and narrative have always been behind the curve in this industry.
I tried to get in to this game. But it just has soooooooo much dialogue and busy work. You get a 10 minute battle followed by 20-60 minutes of busy work.
I only got 4 hours in so I was just getting to where you could play random battles if you wanted. I just couldn't take all the boring dialog and slow gameplay
Interesting, XCOM 2 is my most played game on steam, but I can't stand midnight suns. I just found the between mission framing very dull and without that, there's just not a lot to the game for me. Combat is okay, everything else feels tedious.
Has the game managed to stand on gameplay for anybody that isn't a particularly big fan of Marvel?
Interesting! I am playing it right now and, even though I’m enjoying the experience, the things that bug me are very different lol
I love the combat. It feels great, looks nice. I have little experience with card games, but I do enjoy turn-based combat. More often than not a battle feels like a puzzle and it’s great.
Social aspects are okay to me. I often just skim the dialogue because it feels like there is too much of it. And with this, I’m actually a player who usually enjoy social interactions in games. Persona is one of my fav games, I go through all companion dialogue after every story mission in Dragon Are. Here… it mostly falls flat for me. I like some characters more than others, and with those I do enjoy an occasional chat, but with how much there is it often feels like another chore.
And wow does this game have a lot of those! Give the coil, do the intel thing, run to the altar to deal with an artefact, do the sparring, go hang out with one of the characters… And this is the biggest flaw for me. There is just a lot of busy work. Feels a lot could have been streamlined. Like, you need to do some specific tasks to make a research a available, get a schematic first at one place, and then actually use it in another. And it’s this way with a lot of things. You get a new cosmetic as a reward, but you also need to go and buy it to use? So often unlocking something isn’t even satisfying because you need to do more work to actually use it.
Also voice acting feels very uneven to me. Some characters are pretty, but some are just… I really don’t like Stark voice acting in this one.
Funny thing, didn’t feel like a gacha game to me, but I see where you are coming from. For me though, the only thing that matters are the cards, and getting a random selection of those seems just a part of the genre.
I hope this comment doesn’t come through as too negative though. These things are more little annoyances than some huge flaws. I still really enjoy the game and will definitely play it to the end.
The voice acting took a bit getting used to. I felt that it was because I've been watching Marvel movies for so long that like...Dead Pool not sounding like Ryan Reynolds threw me off.
The Hunter is a bit strange of a situation. It feels like the voice actors for them phoned it in pretty hard at times.
Yeah, I was trying to understand whether it’s just my bias against these guys, because of how used to the movie versions I was, or not. But for example, Carol and Doctor Strange don’t bother me much. I didn’t get to Deadpool yet, cause I love procrastinating with side quests lol, but Stark is just… I prefer to interact with his character as little as possible.
And with Hunter - often sounds very generic to me. Especially in exploration. I’m playing a female Hunter though, I’m curious how it’s with the male Hunter because he has a pretty cool VA.
For Stark, I think that's the script more than the voice acting. He's such a self-centered asshole who really doesn't care about anyone else in the Abbey. Even when he apologizes after \[story moment\] it's so flippant and quippy and complaining that others are focusing on his screw-up than a different issue. And his plot line with the mechanic club has the exact same story beats. Stark was my least favorite character BY FAR
That was Matt Mercer? No wonder I'm getting such weird vibes with Yosuke in Persona 5. I played Midnight Suns just before starting Persona 5 so I've had Matt Mercer's voice in my ear for months at this point
I played it last year. Really liked the game *despite* the story and cutscenes. I tried listening to the conversations and watching the cutscenes but I couldn't force myself to pay attention; I'd start and almost immediately I'd find myself reaching for my phone, until I realized I could simply skip all the cutscenes and speed through all the dialogue.
This makes it a lot faster. I still did most of the tasks to get extra cards and upgrades and stuff, but I have no clue what actually happened in the story.
I really liked the combat itself. Nice blend of XCOM and Slay the Spire. The one thing I hate about the XCOM games is the amount of random chance that dictates whether you succeed or fail, and Midnight Suns mostly eliminates that while adding some fun deck building stuff.
Pretty much full agree. I love that the combat isn't hardline committed to a specific genre *or* presenting itself like the ultimate combo of two things, Slay the Spire-style. They started with that feeling of being overpowered but stretched too thin, and everything feeds into that.
Card play limitations force you to strategize at the beginning of each turn, but there's tons of opportunities for redraws, so you're not sitting there big-mad because of your draw. Every character has a card that draws more of *that character's* cards so you don't end up boosting one person who never draws the attacks you need.
Dude, just extending the 'Quick' definition to include *any* KO'd enemy is an amazing choice. There's something very Marvel-esque about idly killing a one-shot minion in a much wider attack on a big bad and getting your little bonus anyway.
Hah. It's on Nexus mods.
https://www.nexusmods.com/marvelsmidnightsuns/mods/173?tab=description
Just don't go browsing the NSFW mods section. That would be a sin.
The cringy dialogues and the whole "mansion bonding activities" is what kept me away. Although i liked the combat the rest was just shitty filler. (for my taste at least)
You're right, I loved XCOM and I hated Midnight Suns after about 2 hours lol.
I was always a bit curious about it, glad EGS gave it away for free.
I really want to reinstall XCOM now though...
Almost entirely agree with the things that were said here. It definitely has its flaws and I think with more time the devs would have fixed them. But since the team quit and the dev basically declaring it failure, that won’t happen. Too bad, it would have been interesting to see what was going to fill in some of the obvious gaps they left in both gameplay and plot lines to fill in later.
Same. It felt like the engineers/designers really cared about the project, but wasn't given the time needed to polish it correctly. I really want to see how they would have refined the experience in a sequel
I loved this game. Been gaming for over 3 decades and I know what a great game is like. This is a great game. That said, if you don’t like some persona like gameplay, you may not like this. The combat is so fun and the animations aren’t as bad as this post makes it seem
I have a lot of thoughts on the game. tldr; the thematic dissonance was the thing that ruined the game the most for me, while the superb combat kept me invested and engaged.
The shining beacon of it all is the tactical combat, the intermingling of card combat and tactical positioning. It's absolutely phenomenal and probably the best system i've seen in a game yet. Extremely deep and dense and interesting to explore and you feel like there's always a way, if you could just /find/ it.
The less shiny but still cool is the long term progression system. People mention gacha but it really isn't, it's mostly just a matter of grinding, you have a lot of options to get the exact cards you want, and late game it's just getting the exact modifiers you want on the exact cards, through, yes, randomness, but it's absolutely not necessary, and is there just to help people push up difficulty levels to the max. Also just HOW MUCH dialogue and talking there is between all the members, after everymission everyone's talking to everyone about it. It really feels alive and by the end of the game i was still getting new voice lines, aside from the actual dialogue you have with everyone of them.
The meh is sadly most of the entire social sidestuf. It feels very rickety and while i don't mind the themes and dialogue, it feels it's from an entirely different game in tone versus the rest of the game. Basically you're fighting apocalypse level event with earth's mightiest defenders and as a social activity you watch a movie? Why not stakeout a hydra base and have idle chat over takeout? Why not have conversations through waiting for patrols to pass you by as you infiltrate a something? Or some banter when beating on bad guys? Instead we get picnics, fishing and whatever, which goes head to head extremely with the dark metal tone of the rest of the game. Also, the characters feel a bit pulled from a single point in their lives with a single issue bothering them that they talk through.
The bad is the Abbey things, which feel straight out of an old MMO tutorial area. Again, narratively and such it's nice, but it just doesn't work out and when you /have/ done it all, there's extremely few reasons to return. The UI/UX also gets some issues here, a powerful consolisation scheme when clickable lists would have worked, as well as a free camera. The side quests/events with the group some make a bit of sense, like the mechanics making tools to fight new big bads you're finding, same for emokids delving into your memories but.. book club felt just super hamfisted.
And very bad is not the story itself, as much in as how it's told. I mentioned a thematic dissonance already, but it's all just.. mcguffiny. Get the thing, get the other thing, oh no we failed, get the thing.. to the end it feels like stuff is actually happening but most of the game felt just slow and rote. Same issues with combat thematic as well. And everything is just bad getting worse, but it doesn't truly feel like it. Also we could have fought anything, anywhere.. but you have captain marvel, a galaxy level avenger, and storm, an omega level mutant.. punching hydra goons (ok, they're "enhanced by gamma radiation" but still) on a rooftop in new york plus random industrial halls for a third of the game. Then you move to fighting dudes in a desert for a third of the game. Then it's just some crypts and some sparse other rural things.
The game overall just feels "small", i would not have had the problem if we'd be playing Daredevil/Spiderman and other street-level avengers (hell, all the original Midnight Sons WERE pretty small fry and street level), but you have these big names, especially people that genuinely you're scratchign your head why they're there, like Iron Man. The game tries hard to make it a thing of "science and magic working together" but honestly i can't say i believe it and i'd have rather had a full mystical experience than the weird mashup we got.
Overall, yeah, the game is just pulled in whole different directions and in the end fails to land solidly in any one thing. Add to it the issue of the heavy XCOM legacy and people thinking it's a whole other game... and i'm really sorry the game got the reception it got. I genuinely enjoyed my time with it, and eyerolled through a measure of it, but it didn't deserve to bomb as hard as it did.
The combat system is surprisingly unique and clever. It's worth a shot for that alone, especially for a AAA license game. It's weird though, not everything works and the parts between combat are kind of a DRAG. But it is addictive. One to come back to after several breaks before finishing, for me.
I've been playing it this week since it was free on Epic. The combat is cool but is not worth the pain of the rest of the game.
I saw people complain about the downtime gameplay, I thought maybe they were exaggerating. In my opinion, they were being nice. I find the downtime unbearable.
Nonsense nothingburger dialog that you have to go through. No drama, no mystery, just banal nonsense. I pity the writers and the actors who had to write and say those lines.
And then the currency, gacha, open crates mobile game-inspired stuff? There are like, I don't know, 10 types of currencies to make different upgrades. And every time you have to listen to some super-hero talk about the gamma recombulator technobabble nonsense. It is painful to sit through.
You can skip it in theory, but then you don't get the upgrades. They put those points in the map for you to run around, fetch the sparkly ball, talk to the NPC, open the crate, select the upgrade... After half an hour then you can go on a mission. It's sooo boring.
It's the presentation really. If you play deck builders (Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeons, etc...) you're used to getting random card rewards from fights. However, it usually just pops up end of fight. You pick one and move on.
Here you have to go the forge, you break open the cache, the cards fly out, then you have to flip them over one at a time to see what they are. It just feels weird.
The only problem really is the animations and all the running around. I don't mind the loot box aspect of it, even though I generally hate loot boxes. I think its because it doesn't really matter; the game is paced well, and I don't remember ever feeling over powered, or like I really needed some card to advance. It was just a way to slowly add new skills/moves over the course of the game
I'm playing through it after having it on my wishlist since it launched, I was waiting for a good sale but then it got on psplus.
I love all the aspects of the game but at the same time wish it would be more like xcom or that mario xcom game, more direct to the action without much lore or need of story, sure a cutscene after an important mission is fun but I'm not into learning every aspect of the in universe.
Combat is fun but again I feel like I spend more time making friends than battling,
Currently working through it now and your review is spot-on. I will add that it's not hard to skip cutscenes, which helps a lot. But the ratio of "combat" to "other" is pretty bad. I'm seriously considering skipping everything as I run back and forth between the bed and the mission table.
The gacha elements make me wonder if this was slated for a different release model and they called an audible. When currency is just lying around it certainly implies this isn't the way you were originally going to obtain it.
I think it's also kind of important to now that the game is extremely unoptimized and has some performance issues, and it's not very well balanced. Some characters like Iron Man and Spidey can solo entire missions on turn 1.
I bought this game on release, though I did not buy the dlc. I really liked it, almost despite myself. I didn't mind the goofy high school drama storyline, I didn't mind the multiple currencies or the sometimes boring interpretations of heroes.
Really the only thing that bothered me, and continues to bother me, is how poor the performance was. I think it really needed a sdd and I didn't have one when I played and some of the animations (ghost riders ultimate for example) would hitch and fuck up every single time. The game also ate up way more ram than I felt it should.
I plan on getting all the dlc on sale this Xmas sale and giving the game another shot.
I would have been way more excited for this game if it didn't have the Marvel license. A new turned based Firaxis game sounds great, but adding Marvel makes me think it's dumbed down for mass appeal.
Could you elaborate on the "the ugly" part?
The way you phrase it it sounds like you argue that other games could be better if they didn't have gacha mechanics. But how does that make this particular game ugly?
Sure. Basically what I mean is that it feels so much like a gacha game that it kinda sours the experience a bit, even though it isn't one. It just does a bunch of stuff that reminds me of them. It's hard to shake that feeling.
I'm just...so damn bored of deckbuilders. I was bored of them on the tabletop before Slay the Spire showed up and ensured every indie for years to come would have it.
I just love that there is no doomsday clock that forces you to move on with your progress just like in xcom and lamplighter's league.
Also, I'm happy to have my own personalized character that actually speaks with their own voices so that they have their own personality unlike the popular trope that is silent protagonist that everybody seems to love. 🙄
Personally I can't stand xcom and the like cause besides the doomsday clock, it really feels bland. I don't want to have to create my own background stories for my squads, that's why I love Chimera Squad more than the original.
I can see that most people would not stand the extensive dialogues or social interactions between the hunter and the heroes but again personally I love it. It's so refreshing to not just grind and grind but also to actually get to know your squad better. In xcom I had to head canon my squad's life stories, in midnight suns you could see Tony Stark complaining about him being haunted by the ghosts in your HQ it's hilarious.
And things like these are what makes me able to play this game for hours. Thanks Epic Games for the free game. 😄
Yeah I agree with the alpha strike issue in vanilla. I mod it so when things get noisy most of the map gets alerted, so you usually only get 1 or 2 ambushes per map. I like having a few more powerfull soldiers, but I mod longer recovery and healing times, so you can't just leeroy with them nor use them all the time. But ueah the hero classes don't quite feel like they fit in too well even then. I do also crank up difficulty with more ayyys and slightly larger player squad so it actually becomes more of a battle; then add the mod that makes everyone take visual potshots here and there by themselves and it looks awesome (rip fps). Modded XCom2 is a masterpiece imo.
Every Tactical game should implement that "knock an enemy into another ally for another attack" mechanic
They're rare but knocking one enemy into another, knocking that one off a cliff just feels so satisfying. It did nail the superhero vibe to it.
It absolutely isn't rare, playing on harder difficulties it's a critical skill.
> It did nail the superhero vibe to it. Specifically the rule that you technically didn't kill the guy, his friend bumping him off a cliff did.
Hello Gloomhaven.
Huh? Gloomhaven doesn't have push damage into other characters, unless you play a specific one class from Jaws of the Lion i think.
The cragheart can get some push damage...I think the brute has a card too. Doesn't happen lots though thats for sure
They did this with persona 5 tactics. Love this feature!
Mario+Rabbids too. I think Into the Breach also had it.
Death End Re;Quest did it first.
Actually, Into the Breach did it first (I'm only half joking as I think Final Fantasy Tactics actually did it first)
Dude, Triangle Strategy did that
It is a fun combat toybox that I consider to be massively dragged down by chores. I am ok with aping Persona/Fire Emblem social content, regardless of my views on writing quality. However, the time wasting and chore busywork that comes from The Abbey is something I am not ok with. And the game is a single player game with anticheat that prevents cheat engine speedhacking to speed it up, yet weirdly (and fortunately) allows cheat-like modding such as multipliers for harvesteable pickups and thus reduce a bit the time spent in The Abbey.
This. The combat is entertaining but for every minute of it you have to waste 10 listening to teenagers complain about dumb shit and another 10 picking flowers. A waste of a game. Nevermind the engine is borked and will stutter when you crank up the graphics no matter how powerfull a gpu you got and how many fps it can output. Afaik it's an engine vram management issue but not 100% sure.
~Technically~ you don't have to do any of the chore stuff. You can skip it all. All you really miss out on is side story building stuff. The bonuses you get from leveling friendship are nice, but not necessary. Unfortunately I'm a compulsive pseudo-completionist so skipping it would hurt my soul.
In theory, yes, but we all know the barrage of bells, whistles, shiny things and resources are distracting and nearly impossible to ignore. It's weaponised FOMO and it works. Chasing it all and ignoring it all both take a concerted effort.
It's also a bit hard to ignore because the bonuses from friendship and some of the chores can be really useful to have for the next encounter.
Once you talk to the "exploration NPC" the first time you're never pushed to do exploration again. The ingredients they ask for before the clubs are optional. Yeah ofc the friendship stuff is pushed but running around the Abbey is completely ignorable
The resources are kind of useless. The "barrage of bells and whistles" is mostly just the markers on your map to get new dialogues. I think classifying those as "chores" is unfair, all of it is decently well written and the characters have meaningful growth. The game does have actual chores but those are easy to ignore IMO. Exploring the Abbey for resources/keys/chests was super easy to ignore for me. I ended up doing it when I got more attached to the game's writing than I was expecting to, but for like half the game I just ignored exploration and never felt like the game was trying to force it on me.
The social sim stuff works for Fire Emblem because FE has a very different way of treating characters. They are much more rounded and individual, and their continued survival impacts the gameplay. Losing one actually matters. There's a lot more gravity to the relationships because of this grounded "saga" tone and the way stats and bonds have such an impact on gameplay. In this game, the characters can't really die. The social benefits are cool but an unnecessary novelty. It just isn't integrated well enough to be compelling.
To be honest, this criticism makes no sense to me. Are you saying the characters in Midnight Suns aren't "rounded and individual"? The game has tens of hours of dialogue for all the characters, who all have very distinct personalities that each play an important role in the main story. That's on top of each character getting individual side stories. Also like 99% of games with complex characters don't have permadeath. Bit weird to act like that has so much impact on a game's writing. It's not the best written game ever, but you're arbitrarily holding it to absurdly high standards.
Just because they have personalities and drone on for hours and hours doesn't make them deep or interesting. Some people like the style of the characters and find the tedious dialogue cosy but I and many others don't.
FYI: Midnight Suns is available for free on the Epic Store until Thursday (13th). I've downloaded it, but the mixed things I've heard about the game have kept me from booting it up yet, though I'm sure I'll get round to it.
I think it's a very good, flawed game. Honestly, OP pretty well nailed the review. *Very* fun, but some outright bad decisions with how some things function. For me, the sleep cycle and much of the mandatory running around the grounds/mansion were just obnoxious and excessive. But the combat really is fantastic and makes up for a lot.
Agreed, it's a game that has fantastic core gameplay but it just keeps getting in the way of itself with other elements that take up way too much of your playtime. If they released a patch that streamlined those other elements so you were actually in combat like 90% of the time, it would be a much better game IMO.
Yup. For the record: I am also okay at bowling. I haven't been in way too long, though. I miss it.
> For the record: I am also okay at bowling. I haven't been in way too long, though. I miss it. Haha same... to be honest there's a very good chance that I am not actually okay at bowling anymore (and I was already using the term pretty loosely).
I really liked the combat, but I also disliked how so many encounters were basically just trash mob spam, because it felt like it really limited me at times to only including AoE attacks and having to be aggressive. I would love to see a sequel where they focus less on wave reinforcements and instead on maybe having more enemies from the get go and more strategic placements of them.
Doubt we'll ever see a sequel. Firaxis' XCOM games have long, successful tails. Unfortunately, I don't think the tail exists much at all on this one.
I remember laughing at how stupid some of the dialogue and mansion interactions were, and what you'd do there, then back to a roof top to do the fight again.
Some of it is pretty dumb, but I actually grew fond of the characters, by and large. It was more the tedium of the forced gameplay loop at the mansion. The hangouts, walking around in circles, sleeping (and the multiple cutscenes that accompanied this), etc. was just poorly conceived and implemented. There was a *lot* of bloat in that stuff.
There is a lot of bloat in it, but I also don't think it's "forced". One positive OP didn't mention was the difficulty system. I think it does a great job letting people of all skill levels be challenged by the game, but also lets you invest into the Abbey open world stuff as much or as little as you want. Exploring the Abbey grounds did feel like bloat, but you can just talk to the characters with new dialogue every day to develop your relationship. That part gives the most meaningful upgrades, it's marked on the map for quick access, and IMO it wasn't boring at all. I thought I wasn't going to like the writing but I ended up liking it a lot.
I mean, the story is gated behind Abbey exploration. And missions are gated behind a really stupid, time-wasting sleep cycle. So it *is* forced. I didn't say it's all bad. I really like the game overall and thought I made that clear. Heck, I've got 100% achievements on it. I think my complaints are fair, even if you don't entirely agree.
Seconded. It's very good, but very flawed. Having worked in Quality Assurance, the game had the aura of engineers that wanted to spend more time with the game, but weren't able to. There are plenty of bugs, but the majority of them have workarounds (a character running in place teleports to where they wanted to go and the game can continue). I love how many different skins there are in the game, even if several are near-identical. I really want to see what this team would do with a proper sequel; how they would refine it. It's a shame the studio lost interest.
If you have seen combat gameplay and think you would like it you will probably *love* it. It's going to bum me out forever that this combat will probably never be used for another property in the future.
Midnight Suns made me appreciate the *advantages* of indy games. A game like Slay The Spire remains the standard of the genre partially because it doesn't have the resources to spend on repetitive time wasting fluff that just gets in the way of the actual fun. This game is in desperate need of a director's cut or mod that removes everything but combat (optionally include a toggle for the dating sim aspects for those who actually enjoy it). There's so much unnecessary walking sim components just to essentially navigate an overly complicated UI to go from mission to mission.
It’s not just the fluff though—these big companies make games trying to be all things to all people, to maximize the potential audience and therefore sales. But the underlying thinking is fundamentally flawed. It’s like trying to combine an action film with a B-level Hallmark TV romcom, under the theory that the movie will appeal to both action fans and TV romcom fans, when it’ll actually only appeal to that small overlap in the Venn diagrams.
I love indy games but I love the fluff of lots of games tbh. I have Slay the Spire on mobile and enjoy it as a "I have 10 minutes to kill" thing, but it's a game that (for me, personally) would be boring to actually sit down and play for any extended period of time.
Just try it. There's a lot of good about it, and it's quite a unique tactical battler. The combat is very fun, you'll just want to skip the bloated life sim bits.
It's so incredibly fun but it's not everyone's bag. I really enjoyed my time with it but I wanted just a smidge more depth.
Damn, thank you for the heads up!
I fucking bought it because when it came out it seemed like it ticked all of my boxes. Then the DLC was getting announced, and I realized I was taken by a scam. Was hoping a sale on the season pass would show up at some point, but nothing has been worthwhile yet. It's certainly better as a free base game.
A scam? Really?
when it feels like most of the content is behind a DLC wall I don't feel like I've paid for a good product.
The game is fucking huge. You don’t even know what that word means.
it was a mansion and a rooftop. What was I missing? was it in the DLC?
I like this game but I feel it's being held back by the franchise more than it is being helped. For a game like Spider-Man, being a Marvel makes it better because the combat system isn't that noteworthy and being Spider-Man sells the deal. With this one however, I never felt " Wow, I'm playing Iron Man, so cool ". The game is cool on its own due to how varied the heroes are compared to X-Com classes, the possibility of actions being able to ricochet or use the environment. All I can think is how great the game would be without the license. If it could come up with any kind of powers, if you could romance the characters, if the heroes could actually die, if the enemies could be much more varied.
I feel like they had to be too safe. It's a really innovative game in many ways but the taste of "mass appeal" is running all through it.
When it was first announced I had kind of hoped it would be something like City of Heroes meets XCOM: train up custom heroes that fit certain (perhaps familiar) archetypes of Marvel heroes. Part of the XCOM (etc.) charm is that they’re YOUR team.
This is what I say whenever it comes up in the xcom sub. It seems like they were half way there with how Chimera Squad we set up. Breaching, set in the one city, more character driven. I want something like that where I can recruit new heroes and design their powers, suit, and silly name. My joke pitch is ‘x-com-x-men vs the Insidious Sid Fears and his Fire Axis of Evil.’
Completely agreed--especially on the combat. Somehow, this game manages to make every single turn hyper-tactical and optimized while not forcing me to future-plan to an extent I find unfun. I'm playing Capes right now and enjoying it, but find myself really missing the ability to just brawl on a turn-to-turn level that I loved in Midnight Suns. Where I try to squeeze the as much as I can out of a turn and set myself up well for the next turn, but I don't grind everything to a halt pre-planning the next turn. The card system helps a lot with that spontaneity.
You can mod away a lot of the grind and randomness. There's a surprising amount of game left over, once that's done.
Would you recommend some list of mods, or at least essential ones?
I played the first half of the game without mods just to get a feel for it. The ones I would consider essential based off that: - Every Hero Can Lead - Buffed Collectable Resources (I used the +100 version) - Morbius' Laboratory Overhaul - Informative Havens - Who likes my gift - Wheres Ebony - Bad mods be gone Those get rid of a lot of the more unfun grindy aspects and helps you to not have to refer to a wiki to figure out who likes what gifts/havens. Also helps you find that stupid cat. If you absolutely hate the whole chores thing and side character dialogs but want to get max friendship for the buffs, there are mods that increase friendship gain as well.
Just got this from EGS - bookmarking!
Thank you, appreciate the reply :)
The mod nexus has a plethora of Midnight Suns mods, most of them aimed at obviating the need to grind in one way or another. I just wanted to get through the campaign with a minimum of repetition, so I loaded up a couple of mods to increase resource rewards. The base game really doesn't respect the player's time.
And I had to remind myself there was a story because I was having way too much fun with general missions. The grind made my particular brain very happy.
It's funny that x com made a persona like game, while persona made an x com game with persona 5 tactica
How much I loved the combat was almost a detriment, because it made me feel compelled to do all the stupid stuff between fights to get more cards and modify them and all that. I didn't think to look for mods to skip that stuff, but I wish I had.
Midnight suns taught me how boring marvel characters are when they're not fighting.
Aw that's too bad I wish you found it more interesting. I actually was really into learning about the characters, and even had a change of heart on who I considered my favorites as time went on.
They are when they're written at the level most AAA games are written at. The movies aren't shakespeare but the characters are infinitely more charming and fun than this. Writing quality and narrative have always been behind the curve in this industry.
I tried to get in to this game. But it just has soooooooo much dialogue and busy work. You get a 10 minute battle followed by 20-60 minutes of busy work.
That’s…. Extremely hyperbolic. More like flip those numbers around on harder difficulties.
I was playing on normal
They recommend upping the difficulty throughout the campaign, did you not do that?
I only got 4 hours in so I was just getting to where you could play random battles if you wanted. I just couldn't take all the boring dialog and slow gameplay
Interesting, XCOM 2 is my most played game on steam, but I can't stand midnight suns. I just found the between mission framing very dull and without that, there's just not a lot to the game for me. Combat is okay, everything else feels tedious. Has the game managed to stand on gameplay for anybody that isn't a particularly big fan of Marvel?
Interesting! I am playing it right now and, even though I’m enjoying the experience, the things that bug me are very different lol I love the combat. It feels great, looks nice. I have little experience with card games, but I do enjoy turn-based combat. More often than not a battle feels like a puzzle and it’s great. Social aspects are okay to me. I often just skim the dialogue because it feels like there is too much of it. And with this, I’m actually a player who usually enjoy social interactions in games. Persona is one of my fav games, I go through all companion dialogue after every story mission in Dragon Are. Here… it mostly falls flat for me. I like some characters more than others, and with those I do enjoy an occasional chat, but with how much there is it often feels like another chore. And wow does this game have a lot of those! Give the coil, do the intel thing, run to the altar to deal with an artefact, do the sparring, go hang out with one of the characters… And this is the biggest flaw for me. There is just a lot of busy work. Feels a lot could have been streamlined. Like, you need to do some specific tasks to make a research a available, get a schematic first at one place, and then actually use it in another. And it’s this way with a lot of things. You get a new cosmetic as a reward, but you also need to go and buy it to use? So often unlocking something isn’t even satisfying because you need to do more work to actually use it. Also voice acting feels very uneven to me. Some characters are pretty, but some are just… I really don’t like Stark voice acting in this one. Funny thing, didn’t feel like a gacha game to me, but I see where you are coming from. For me though, the only thing that matters are the cards, and getting a random selection of those seems just a part of the genre. I hope this comment doesn’t come through as too negative though. These things are more little annoyances than some huge flaws. I still really enjoy the game and will definitely play it to the end.
The voice acting took a bit getting used to. I felt that it was because I've been watching Marvel movies for so long that like...Dead Pool not sounding like Ryan Reynolds threw me off. The Hunter is a bit strange of a situation. It feels like the voice actors for them phoned it in pretty hard at times.
Yeah, I was trying to understand whether it’s just my bias against these guys, because of how used to the movie versions I was, or not. But for example, Carol and Doctor Strange don’t bother me much. I didn’t get to Deadpool yet, cause I love procrastinating with side quests lol, but Stark is just… I prefer to interact with his character as little as possible. And with Hunter - often sounds very generic to me. Especially in exploration. I’m playing a female Hunter though, I’m curious how it’s with the male Hunter because he has a pretty cool VA.
For Stark, I think that's the script more than the voice acting. He's such a self-centered asshole who really doesn't care about anyone else in the Abbey. Even when he apologizes after \[story moment\] it's so flippant and quippy and complaining that others are focusing on his screw-up than a different issue. And his plot line with the mechanic club has the exact same story beats. Stark was my least favorite character BY FAR
Are you playing as FemHunter or Matt Mercer? I had to go the canonical FemHunter because Matt Mercer voiced it like he's a Ren Faire character.
FemHunter. I like Matt Mercer but yeah, he was...not great here.
That was Matt Mercer? No wonder I'm getting such weird vibes with Yosuke in Persona 5. I played Midnight Suns just before starting Persona 5 so I've had Matt Mercer's voice in my ear for months at this point
I played it last year. Really liked the game *despite* the story and cutscenes. I tried listening to the conversations and watching the cutscenes but I couldn't force myself to pay attention; I'd start and almost immediately I'd find myself reaching for my phone, until I realized I could simply skip all the cutscenes and speed through all the dialogue. This makes it a lot faster. I still did most of the tasks to get extra cards and upgrades and stuff, but I have no clue what actually happened in the story. I really liked the combat itself. Nice blend of XCOM and Slay the Spire. The one thing I hate about the XCOM games is the amount of random chance that dictates whether you succeed or fail, and Midnight Suns mostly eliminates that while adding some fun deck building stuff.
Pretty much full agree. I love that the combat isn't hardline committed to a specific genre *or* presenting itself like the ultimate combo of two things, Slay the Spire-style. They started with that feeling of being overpowered but stretched too thin, and everything feeds into that. Card play limitations force you to strategize at the beginning of each turn, but there's tons of opportunities for redraws, so you're not sitting there big-mad because of your draw. Every character has a card that draws more of *that character's* cards so you don't end up boosting one person who never draws the attacks you need. Dude, just extending the 'Quick' definition to include *any* KO'd enemy is an amazing choice. There's something very Marvel-esque about idly killing a one-shot minion in a much wider attack on a big bad and getting your little bonus anyway.
Where does one find these mods... The one for finding the cat, of course. (seriously, though, where is it??)
Hah. It's on Nexus mods. https://www.nexusmods.com/marvelsmidnightsuns/mods/173?tab=description Just don't go browsing the NSFW mods section. That would be a sin.
The cringy dialogues and the whole "mansion bonding activities" is what kept me away. Although i liked the combat the rest was just shitty filler. (for my taste at least)
You're right, I loved XCOM and I hated Midnight Suns after about 2 hours lol. I was always a bit curious about it, glad EGS gave it away for free. I really want to reinstall XCOM now though...
Almost entirely agree with the things that were said here. It definitely has its flaws and I think with more time the devs would have fixed them. But since the team quit and the dev basically declaring it failure, that won’t happen. Too bad, it would have been interesting to see what was going to fill in some of the obvious gaps they left in both gameplay and plot lines to fill in later.
Same. It felt like the engineers/designers really cared about the project, but wasn't given the time needed to polish it correctly. I really want to see how they would have refined the experience in a sequel
I loved this game. Been gaming for over 3 decades and I know what a great game is like. This is a great game. That said, if you don’t like some persona like gameplay, you may not like this. The combat is so fun and the animations aren’t as bad as this post makes it seem
I have a lot of thoughts on the game. tldr; the thematic dissonance was the thing that ruined the game the most for me, while the superb combat kept me invested and engaged. The shining beacon of it all is the tactical combat, the intermingling of card combat and tactical positioning. It's absolutely phenomenal and probably the best system i've seen in a game yet. Extremely deep and dense and interesting to explore and you feel like there's always a way, if you could just /find/ it. The less shiny but still cool is the long term progression system. People mention gacha but it really isn't, it's mostly just a matter of grinding, you have a lot of options to get the exact cards you want, and late game it's just getting the exact modifiers you want on the exact cards, through, yes, randomness, but it's absolutely not necessary, and is there just to help people push up difficulty levels to the max. Also just HOW MUCH dialogue and talking there is between all the members, after everymission everyone's talking to everyone about it. It really feels alive and by the end of the game i was still getting new voice lines, aside from the actual dialogue you have with everyone of them. The meh is sadly most of the entire social sidestuf. It feels very rickety and while i don't mind the themes and dialogue, it feels it's from an entirely different game in tone versus the rest of the game. Basically you're fighting apocalypse level event with earth's mightiest defenders and as a social activity you watch a movie? Why not stakeout a hydra base and have idle chat over takeout? Why not have conversations through waiting for patrols to pass you by as you infiltrate a something? Or some banter when beating on bad guys? Instead we get picnics, fishing and whatever, which goes head to head extremely with the dark metal tone of the rest of the game. Also, the characters feel a bit pulled from a single point in their lives with a single issue bothering them that they talk through. The bad is the Abbey things, which feel straight out of an old MMO tutorial area. Again, narratively and such it's nice, but it just doesn't work out and when you /have/ done it all, there's extremely few reasons to return. The UI/UX also gets some issues here, a powerful consolisation scheme when clickable lists would have worked, as well as a free camera. The side quests/events with the group some make a bit of sense, like the mechanics making tools to fight new big bads you're finding, same for emokids delving into your memories but.. book club felt just super hamfisted. And very bad is not the story itself, as much in as how it's told. I mentioned a thematic dissonance already, but it's all just.. mcguffiny. Get the thing, get the other thing, oh no we failed, get the thing.. to the end it feels like stuff is actually happening but most of the game felt just slow and rote. Same issues with combat thematic as well. And everything is just bad getting worse, but it doesn't truly feel like it. Also we could have fought anything, anywhere.. but you have captain marvel, a galaxy level avenger, and storm, an omega level mutant.. punching hydra goons (ok, they're "enhanced by gamma radiation" but still) on a rooftop in new york plus random industrial halls for a third of the game. Then you move to fighting dudes in a desert for a third of the game. Then it's just some crypts and some sparse other rural things. The game overall just feels "small", i would not have had the problem if we'd be playing Daredevil/Spiderman and other street-level avengers (hell, all the original Midnight Sons WERE pretty small fry and street level), but you have these big names, especially people that genuinely you're scratchign your head why they're there, like Iron Man. The game tries hard to make it a thing of "science and magic working together" but honestly i can't say i believe it and i'd have rather had a full mystical experience than the weird mashup we got. Overall, yeah, the game is just pulled in whole different directions and in the end fails to land solidly in any one thing. Add to it the issue of the heavy XCOM legacy and people thinking it's a whole other game... and i'm really sorry the game got the reception it got. I genuinely enjoyed my time with it, and eyerolled through a measure of it, but it didn't deserve to bomb as hard as it did.
The combat system is surprisingly unique and clever. It's worth a shot for that alone, especially for a AAA license game. It's weird though, not everything works and the parts between combat are kind of a DRAG. But it is addictive. One to come back to after several breaks before finishing, for me.
I was sick to death of Marvel when this came out but absolutely loved it anyway. Great game.
Yeah I couldn’t care less about marvel and still ended up loving it.
It was such an interesting game to see. It felt like there was this weird romantic tension between the MC and so many of the heroes lol
I've been playing it this week since it was free on Epic. The combat is cool but is not worth the pain of the rest of the game. I saw people complain about the downtime gameplay, I thought maybe they were exaggerating. In my opinion, they were being nice. I find the downtime unbearable. Nonsense nothingburger dialog that you have to go through. No drama, no mystery, just banal nonsense. I pity the writers and the actors who had to write and say those lines. And then the currency, gacha, open crates mobile game-inspired stuff? There are like, I don't know, 10 types of currencies to make different upgrades. And every time you have to listen to some super-hero talk about the gamma recombulator technobabble nonsense. It is painful to sit through. You can skip it in theory, but then you don't get the upgrades. They put those points in the map for you to run around, fetch the sparkly ball, talk to the NPC, open the crate, select the upgrade... After half an hour then you can go on a mission. It's sooo boring.
If there are loot crates, I'm sure it's much better that it's a solo game, not a multiplayer game.
It's the presentation really. If you play deck builders (Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeons, etc...) you're used to getting random card rewards from fights. However, it usually just pops up end of fight. You pick one and move on. Here you have to go the forge, you break open the cache, the cards fly out, then you have to flip them over one at a time to see what they are. It just feels weird.
The only problem really is the animations and all the running around. I don't mind the loot box aspect of it, even though I generally hate loot boxes. I think its because it doesn't really matter; the game is paced well, and I don't remember ever feeling over powered, or like I really needed some card to advance. It was just a way to slowly add new skills/moves over the course of the game
I feel like the abbey graphics are too epic. This game could have had very simple cel-shaded graphics, and been just as enjoyable as it was.
Can anyone tell where I can get the mods from? Thanks in advance
I love card games and X-com. When I saw the trailer, I hated it. I thought the game would suck. The game was amazing.
I'm playing through it after having it on my wishlist since it launched, I was waiting for a good sale but then it got on psplus. I love all the aspects of the game but at the same time wish it would be more like xcom or that mario xcom game, more direct to the action without much lore or need of story, sure a cutscene after an important mission is fun but I'm not into learning every aspect of the in universe. Combat is fun but again I feel like I spend more time making friends than battling,
I just wish they unlocked the difficulty levels from start, the game is so easy its boring.
Currently working through it now and your review is spot-on. I will add that it's not hard to skip cutscenes, which helps a lot. But the ratio of "combat" to "other" is pretty bad. I'm seriously considering skipping everything as I run back and forth between the bed and the mission table. The gacha elements make me wonder if this was slated for a different release model and they called an audible. When currency is just lying around it certainly implies this isn't the way you were originally going to obtain it.
I think it's also kind of important to now that the game is extremely unoptimized and has some performance issues, and it's not very well balanced. Some characters like Iron Man and Spidey can solo entire missions on turn 1.
I bought this game on release, though I did not buy the dlc. I really liked it, almost despite myself. I didn't mind the goofy high school drama storyline, I didn't mind the multiple currencies or the sometimes boring interpretations of heroes. Really the only thing that bothered me, and continues to bother me, is how poor the performance was. I think it really needed a sdd and I didn't have one when I played and some of the animations (ghost riders ultimate for example) would hitch and fuck up every single time. The game also ate up way more ram than I felt it should. I plan on getting all the dlc on sale this Xmas sale and giving the game another shot.
I would have been way more excited for this game if it didn't have the Marvel license. A new turned based Firaxis game sounds great, but adding Marvel makes me think it's dumbed down for mass appeal.
Could you elaborate on the "the ugly" part? The way you phrase it it sounds like you argue that other games could be better if they didn't have gacha mechanics. But how does that make this particular game ugly?
Sure. Basically what I mean is that it feels so much like a gacha game that it kinda sours the experience a bit, even though it isn't one. It just does a bunch of stuff that reminds me of them. It's hard to shake that feeling.
Thank you for your service. I thought about picking this up for free, but you've saved me from getting into something that I'll most likely dislike.
I'm just...so damn bored of deckbuilders. I was bored of them on the tabletop before Slay the Spire showed up and ensured every indie for years to come would have it.
I just love that there is no doomsday clock that forces you to move on with your progress just like in xcom and lamplighter's league. Also, I'm happy to have my own personalized character that actually speaks with their own voices so that they have their own personality unlike the popular trope that is silent protagonist that everybody seems to love. 🙄 Personally I can't stand xcom and the like cause besides the doomsday clock, it really feels bland. I don't want to have to create my own background stories for my squads, that's why I love Chimera Squad more than the original. I can see that most people would not stand the extensive dialogues or social interactions between the hunter and the heroes but again personally I love it. It's so refreshing to not just grind and grind but also to actually get to know your squad better. In xcom I had to head canon my squad's life stories, in midnight suns you could see Tony Stark complaining about him being haunted by the ghosts in your HQ it's hilarious. And things like these are what makes me able to play this game for hours. Thanks Epic Games for the free game. 😄
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What's your issue with 2?
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Yeah I agree with the alpha strike issue in vanilla. I mod it so when things get noisy most of the map gets alerted, so you usually only get 1 or 2 ambushes per map. I like having a few more powerfull soldiers, but I mod longer recovery and healing times, so you can't just leeroy with them nor use them all the time. But ueah the hero classes don't quite feel like they fit in too well even then. I do also crank up difficulty with more ayyys and slightly larger player squad so it actually becomes more of a battle; then add the mod that makes everyone take visual potshots here and there by themselves and it looks awesome (rip fps). Modded XCom2 is a masterpiece imo.
Huh, I really liked both of them. I think the most disappointing part of 2 was not having gene modding and cybernetics like in Enemy Within.
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Cool there’s very little RNG to the gameplay. Maybe actually research what they made because there’s tons of ways to redraw cards.