We’ve watched Blade knock a Hydra agent into Wolverine’s waiting claws, used Magik’s portals to cross into the USA from a pocket dimension, gone fishing with Captain America, and forced Doctor Strange to wear eyebrow-raisingly short and tight swimming trunks. We are, quite simply, having lots of fun here.
While this is a game from strategy specialist Firaxis, Midnight Suns is much, much more X-Men than XCOM. It’s essentially a superhero life sim (and yes, that includes plenty of fighting, which we’ll get onto shortly). You play the part of Hunter, a mildly customisable character created especially for the game, who fits in surprisingly well with all the established Marvel heroes. You are the only child of Lilith, the game’s Big Bad, who is trying to summon the elder god Chthon into the world. This would cause an awful lot of trouble, so it’s up to you and your super chums to stop mum causing all that supernatural bother. Well, once the Midnight Suns stop you being dead in the intro, anyway.
On the face of it, the decision to prevent you from playing any of the existing Marvel heroes is a little disappointing, but Hunter’s implementation is a stroke of genius in a few ways. First, as they’ve been dead for a few centuries, they don’t know who any of the heroes are. This means that any player unfamiliar with the lesser-known characters, such as Nico Minoru (Runaways), Illyana Rasputin (AKA Magik, best known via
