Also I didn't know until getting this game that Blade was a Marvel character? Or that Ghost Rider was, for that matter. I'm familiar with both of them because I am an out-of-the-closet fan of both their movies (the Wesley Snipes and Nicolas Cage ones, respectively).

So! As you can guess from the above, I have zero fricken' clue how lore-accurate any of this game is, and y'know what? I don't care. I feel like the characters I 'know' are rotated like 10 degrees off their movie counterparts and I'm okay with that! And the ones I don't know are interesting and portrayed well enough that I don't feel like I need to wikidive to find out details; I'm getting enough from their in-game interactions that it's fully satisfying, if that makes sense.

In short: despite the reports of maximum suckage that I saw flying all over the internet, I'm having a lot of fun!

The best capsule description of the gameplay I've come up with so far is this: Midnight Suns feels like the offspring of the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game and XCOM, with Mass Effect adopting the baby and raising it afterwards.

There are Mass Effect-style RPG exploration elements, where you wander around in over-the-shoulder cam and find collectibles, talk to people, upgrade your abilities, hang out with the dorks, get hit on by Tony*, tear down masterpieces and hang your comic-book cover art in their place, tweak your wardrobe, snark with Blade, and so on. Also you can make (or lose) Friendship Points, which I'm not far enough along yet to see what mechanical effect (if any) that has but feels very Mass Effect-like.

(Becoming besties with Captain Marvel does seem like it'd be a helluva ride, tho, gotta admit.)

During combat, you're facing Mooks, who KO from any hit; Lieutenants, who have actual HP bars and additional abilities; and Bosses, who have big honkin' HP bars, a variety of abilities, and usually multiple phases and/or cutscene triggers. You fight using a card-drawing and deck-manipulating mechanic to employ various superheroic abilities in a clearly XCOM-inspired tactical turn-based battlefield with environmental interactions liberally scattered about. Captain Marvel can use her Photon Beam to hit a line of enemies all at once, damaging and taunting them so they have to attack her during their turn. Iron Man uses his palm repulsors to fling a baddie into the nearby generator, damaging and stunning them for their next turn. Doctor Strange unveils the mysteries of the cosmos and produces new cards to refill your hand -- or just summons a mystical tornado to fling a bad guy into another bad guy, KO'ing them both. The Hunter has Dark abilities and Light abilities and you can affect their Balance by which you choose to use and frankly I'm not sure yet what the point is there, but it's there. The system is not particularly complex but it's surprisingly deep and definitely captures the feel of superhero brawls.

Which is not to say that I don't have complaints. It's a 2K production by Firaxis, and variants of all the weirdness that we had to deal with in the XCOM games are rearing their ugly heads. I'm at a solid 50% for just being able to launch the game -- half the time, it crashes on startup. Although to be fair, if I get past the mind-bogglingly-lagtastic 1 FPS Unreal Engine logo screen, it's been rock-stable and buttery smooth, lookin' pretty on my several-years-old rig at a solid 60FPS. And I don't have to mash Caps Lock during loading screens either! (Hi, XCOM!)

The hair is... well, it's clear that Firaxis 'borrowed' some assets from XCOM, because not only are the hairstyle names the same, the hair IS the same -- including the jaggy yarn-like quality in some of the textures. I launched XCOM2 just to double-check and yup, that there is some XCOM hair. Someone get these folks a stylist, stat.

I would also really like it if the stupid battle camera would stop trying to be helpful and instead just stay where the hell I put it. Minor gripe, but twice now I've set up what I thought was a grand multi-KO finishing blow only to realize that there's one mook left behind the camera where I didn't see them. Grr.

The voice acting is pretty good across the board. I really like Female Hunter's voice. Caretaker has some good lines and some lines where I feel like she's phoning it in, and Nico's VA has this occasional weird delivery where the emPHAsis is on the wrong SYLaBAbble, but I feel like that's a symptom of the VA's all recording their lines in isolation at different times (it's only happened in dialogue between her and other characters and I think the VA was missing some context clues for how the scene was actually playing out vs how it was scripted).

And Blade's VA is a snarky sumbitch and I just like him a lot.

(* presumably Tony only hits on female Hunters, but experimentation is clearly required to test this theory)

--sofaspud
--also you can pet the demon puppy, thumbs up, Firaxis, you're doin' it right