¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

Firaxis Games

PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series S/X, Nintendo Switch

WHILE we wait for a rash of new games to arrive (see my previous column), I have been mopping up a few from last year that I hadn’t yet managed to finish.

The one that has been occupying most of my time is Marvel’s Midnight Suns, which puts you in charge of a team of famous superheroes. You play as a new character called Hunter (you can design their look yourself), a long-dead mystical hero destined to defeat an ancient demonic evil.

The game is in two parts that complement each other. In the first, you go on missions against a variety of villains with a team of three heroes, each of whom has a range of abilities that appear on digital playing cards. You control your team using these cards to defeat enemies and achieve objectives, such as capturing resources or destroying vehicles, and it is very satisfying to pick just the right combination of cards to unleash your superheroic might.

The second part is entirely different. It takes place in Hunter’s home base, a pocket dimension called the Abbey where you and the other heroes can train, research enemies and so on.

But here is where it gets weird: there is also a social element, which means you can join a book club run by the vampire hunter Blade or even go fishing with Spider-Man, both in an effort to deepen your relationships. All of this feeds back into the combat part of the game, as a higher friendship score unlocks new cards and abilities.

Now, I will admit you may be thinking that a game about fighting demons with magic doesn’t sound the most suitable choice for ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ to review, but hear me out. While the game draws on the original Marvel comics rather than connecting to the pop culture-dominating Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), it clearly takes inspiration from it.

If you cast your mind back to early films of the MCU (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Thor), they were at great pains to explain any fantastical elements as actually grounded in science. That is why Thor isn’t a literal god with a magic hammer, he is just an alien whose sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Later films have been much happier to embrace actual magic as the source of some of their heroes’ powers (it is hard to have a scientific explanation for Doctor Strange, for example), but this tension between magic and science still remains, and it is a theme that Midnight Suns mines in an interesting way.

Hunter’s team is roughly split between science-based heroes, such as Iron Man, Spider-Man and Captain America (essentially the Avengers), and the more magic-based heroes, including Doctor Strange and lesser-known ones, like Ghost Rider and Magik. The science-based heroes find it frustrating when they aren’t fully equipped to tackle the demonic foes they face, and Iron Man in particular is freaked out at having to work in the Abbey, where the power for his mechanical tinkering comes from a demonic forge held in check by Doctor Strange.

This version of Iron Man is quite far from Robert Downey Jr.’s carefree playboy depiction, and it is refreshing to see a new take on some of these characters, where they realise that they don’t have all the answers. The social side of the game also means you can take the time to talk to them and understand what makes them tick, or even play video games with Wolverine, because why not?

Jacob Aron is ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ’s news editor. Follow him on Twitter @jjaron