5 Tips Before Jumping Into Marvel’s XCOM Flavored Midnight Suns

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a fun but tangled mess of nylons, lasers, and chill time with Iron Man. Although made by Firaxis Games, the developers behind the valuable turn-based strategy franchise XCOM, midnight suns is its own ridiculous neon, with role-playing elements tightly tied to its turn-based, card-based combat.

There’s a lot going on. It’s a lot to take in. I’m constantly getting pop-up tutorial windows even though I’m about 10 hours deep, so I want things to go smoother for you. These five tips should help you get your game off to a great start. You deserve to spend more time in the game lounging by the pool looking great and less chasing all the pop-ups (there are so many).

Take care of the bullshit

From my description, you might worry that midnight suns is packed with a lot of superfluous bullshit. It’s not wrong – I write “WOW” in my notes every time I come across another mechanic that seems inessential, yet another new thing to craft, level up, join, customize, fight, earn or earn.

And when that happens, I can feel my teenage sassiness returning. I want to ignore the existence of the serum I just found out about, or the club I’m supposed to belong to, or whatever. But it’s really in your best interest to assume most of what midnight suns offers himself. This will not only lead to real combat wins, but also help you immerse yourself in a Marvel candy game.

In particular, I think you should remember to:

• Engage in daily sparring: You can spend money to “fight” (you never see the fight, it’s more like buying a momentary power-up) another superhero every day. You can only battle the same hero once every four days, but the activity still allows you to immediately gain Training XP and Friendship XP, both of which improve the performance of your partner in real combat. Sparring can also get you Arcane Keys, useful for breaking loot boxes scattered around the game.
• Take friendship seriously: Friendship XP improves heroes ability to brawl and unlocks a lot other perks, like combo moves, cosmetics, special abilities, and passives. Raising your friendship with the living skull Ghost Rider, for example, better fills his “soul meter” which adds a powerful Drain Souls card to your deck once he takes out enough enemies. Simple ways to level friendship on a daily basis include initiating a “hangout” with a hero at night, responding to hero advice requests, responding to text messages, and joining clubs. It’s like college except it won’t help you get a job.
• Add everything to your inventory: Catch those bursts of bright color you see throughout the abbey. These will either be essences you can use to craft tinctures you can take into battle (crafting agility serum helpfully adds movement to your hand etc) or currencies you can blow on cosmetics and items. furniture. Random trash around the Abbey can be used as gifts for your new leather-wearing friends – that empty picture frame you found will increase Friendship XP when you unload it on someone else. It pays to be generous. Complete missions with gamma reel rewards then hand them over to iron man to add or improve moves in any hero’s deck. Donating found artifacts to Doctor Strange helps you perform various environmental and crafting upgrades.

But don’t get caught up in it

That said, don’t feel like you have to turn midnight suns in a grocery checklist. I spent a good chunk of my game time going through different optional missions without cashing in on any items or anything. And was it good. While it offers plenty of ways to do this, the game doesn’t seem to take leveling too seriously – your heroes will automatically level up when you repeat certain moves in battle, and any character that falls too far behind will automatically level up. . Taking on high difficulty missions also level up heroes faster. Very easy.

The environment wants to help you

In battle, you get a random set of cards that fire all of your heroes’ abilities. At the risk of sounding obvious, your goal is always to end the turn-based encounter quickly with hard-hitting plays, but that might seem impossible when all you have available to you are knockdown cards for enemies that are immune to. reversal, for example. I know, because I’ve been there. I yelled at my computer.

But combat also demands that you pay attention to your accumulated hero points, which you earn by playing cards with point values ​​displayed on them, and spending them to field your strongest cards. But don’t overlook the less flashy use of hero points, environmental attacks. They can be temperamental, with restrictive impact areas, but since environmental attacks don’t drain your total three combat moves (not counting two card reshuffles), you should keep them in mind to speed up encounters. when the stars align.

Float!

Also for the benefit of fast-passing baddies, you can hover over enemies to learn more about their passives and qualities, to better exploit them. I was surprised to learn that a tricky Hydra specialist has a shock shield that hurts my heroes with certain melee attacks, or that a harmless Hydra officer launches a random “frenzied” attack after two cards instead of the usual three.

The hover tool also tells you which of your heroes an enemy plans to attack on their next turn, although this is also indicated by hero-related symbols floating above their heads. You can again use this combat feature to your advantage, letting it help you determine which characters need immediate healing or which enemies you shouldn’t hesitate to wipe out.

It’s not quite a “hover”, but clicking on a card before playing it will give you more information about it. I like to prioritize cards that refund a turn in exchange for knocking out an enemy. If you combine those card paybacks with the information you learned while hovering, you can lean back and watch the fighters disappear like snuffed out candles.

Go to bed

This is eternal advice. Everyone needs their beauty rest, even an immortal video game protagonist. When you’re done fighting, charming the Avengers with weird gifts, and kicking Hydra officers into crackling electrical boxes, make sure your character, the hunter, heads to his room to sleep. This heals injuries sustained in battle, making you a more effective fighter and, more importantly, kicks you off into another day of bad tempered crime-fighting.