Recent reviews by Vali

I quit playing for several years and upon picking it back up this blew my mind and became one of my favorite gaming memories:

I was on this new planet building a base, and I ran out of stuff to build with. My freighter was in orbit above me, so I hop in my ship to fly up for some more materials. As soon as I leave the atmosphere I get a call on my starship communicator. It's a pirate trying to mug me. He attacks when I don't pay up and the next thing I know my freighter is shooting lasers everywhere and I get another radio call. It's my frigate telling me they are coming to help and then it launches a fcking fighter squadron to defend me, which I had no idea it could even do. Full on star wars style space battle out of nowhere. It was the coolest effing random encounter I've had in a game.

This game has gotten massive expansion pack style updates every few months for the last 8 years, for FREE. I can't think of any other game like that.

Turn based combat where your damage comes from a mix of hero abilities and envionmental hazards-Similar to XCOM, Mario + Rabbids, or even the Paper Mario series.

You have a central home base you unlock upgrades for and a roster of heroes you rotate and train. This is where the game is most XCOM-like. The way you get short little cutscenes of your chosen squad delpoying to a misison and team photos of them at the end. The way you manage research projects, gadget manufacturing, and team member injuries in between missions. Really scratches the XCOM itch.

The combat itself is quite different though. It feels very similar to the way Mario + Rabbids mixes it's emphasis on a few abilities mixed with team interactions and interacting with the level itself to remove enemies.

Graphically it has moments where it's beautiful. In combat, the hero powers and effects like fire, explosions, etc tend to look awesome. Everywhere else however, models and textures don't always look the greatest.

One area the game truly excels is it's dedication and homage to Marvel lore. There is SO MUCH lore content (you can read or ignore most if uninterested) scattered around the game. So much dialogue, journal entries, and cosmetics that make it clear this game was made by people who love and appreciate the source material. Also I thought it was pretty neat that the actress who played NIco in the Hulu show was given the chance to voice Nico in Midnight Suns despite it being her first voice acting gig.

There is hours of content in this game even should you choose to ignore missions and just play it as a superhero friendship and dress up simulator.

In short:
-If you like turn based strategy you will likely enjoy this game.
-If you are a Marvel nerd who loves the characters and all the lore they've built over the years, you will love this game.
- Be aware there are some performance hitches and if you have a weaker PC and are close to the minimum requirements it might not run well enough to justify buying it. (EDIT: It runs fine on max settings if you disable the 2k launcher....cannot suggest googling that enough)

I expected to like this game. I did not expect to love it, nor for it to have so many hours of potential play time in store. It's been years since I've been this pleasantly surprised by how good a game ended up being.

If you grew up on the old school simcity games and want to scratch that itch, this is your best bet.