When Marvel’s Midnight Suns revealed glimpses of gameplay last week, not many may have expected the tactical RPG by the makers of XCOM is going to make it a card game.
The latest gameplay showcase for Marvel’s Midnight Suns should give you a better look at how the card system works in battles. The team at Firaxis showed a full mission where the Hunter and their chosen squadmates for the mission Blade and Doctor Strange take on a bunch of Hydra goons.
Once the battle ends, a cinematic showed how The Hunter gets attacked by Sabretooth, separating them from the team. Luckily Wolverine is hanging around nearby and proceeds to team up with the Hunter. This is the first scene involving the two mutants in Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
The first thing the devs mention on the showcase is that there are no micro-transactions to buy card packs. All cards, which are the abilities you can use, are unlocked through gameplay.
Here’s the summary of how a normal tactical battle in Marvel’s Midnight Suns works:
- Each character have their assigned abilities (cards) you can customise
- Ability cards comes in three kinds: attacks, skills, and heroics
- Using attacks and skills build heroism, used to use heroic cards
- Abilities have keyword properties (like card games do)
- All characters have a larger HP pool compared to XCOM
- damage-dealing cardshave damage number displayed on cards
- A lot of abilities that can chain damage to other enemies (knockback can hit other enemies)
- A lot of emphasis on environmental damage via destructible objects (useful for attack chaining)
- You have limited number of cards you can play, characters you can move, and card redraws per turn
- The cards in your hand will include each of the three characters in your squad, not one hand per character
- Wolverine can use environmental objects to attack, doesn’t use a card but uses heroism
- Wolverine can taunt enemies and has health regen
- You are allowed to move a character anywhere in the grid-less battlefield, it will only count as one move after you use an ability for the character
- The game runs in a version of Unreal Engine 4, a new engine compared to XCOM
- There’s a photo mode button
It’s going to be a lot of re-learning for XCOM veterans wanting to jump into Midnight Suns, because this is not just an XCOM reskin. Hit percentages are gone, but now we have to deal with a different kind of RNG – card draws.
Still, the new style of combat is rather interesting. You don’t move the characters as much and are more about picking the right ability combos to maximise your damage, at least that’s what’s shown in this gameplay showcase here.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is set for release in March 2022 for the PS4, PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.