This game really took me by surprise. Its existence nearly passed me by when it launched in late 2022.

Little did I know: Firaxis Games and the XCOM team had just made a Marvel XCOM Mass Effect Card Battler.

WHAT?

I don't normally click with card battlers, and I am very burned out on superhero multimedia, but Midnight Suns quickly got its hooks in me, and I could not put it down. Maybe I'm just burned out on trash multimedia.

- If you like Marvel content, that's an easy reason to enjoy this. There's a good mix of superstar Avengers heroes and lesser known Midnight Suns heroes in the game.

- All of this game's DNA screams XCOM, the battles have just been converted to a smaller arena based around card battling, rather than a large cover and fog of war-based combat system. All of the management systems at play in your out of combat base, The Abbey, are very similar to XCOM headquarters. Train with your heroes, upgrade your cards, buy items, explore the Abbey grounds to find secrets and loot, and quite a bit more in-between combat missions.

- A friendship and hangout Social system with all of the heroes. Have some beers with Blade or go fishing with Wolverine, and you get battle bonuses for building these relationships, creating a great side progression system.

- I honestly don't play enough card battlers to give an expert gamer opinion on how deep the card strategy and deckbuilding is. But I started the game pretty inept, and by the end I was fine-tuning my hero decks, playing cards for a turn or two ahead, and optimizing my combat action sequences for maximum effect.

- The one DLC expansion that came out before development ended, The Good, The Bad, and the Undead, was just as high quality as the base game and integrated into it seamlessly. It was also amazing near the end when Morbius screamed "ITS MORBIN' TIME"

- This has a LOT of dialogue, in a dialogue system that will be familiar if you've played the Mass Effect trilogy. The writing is never that good, in fact it can be quite comic book hammy at times, but this game is suitably epic. I accomplished a lot, but did NOT "100%" this game, and this was teetering on 90 hours played. That's bigger than the entire Mass Effect trilogy on completionist runs.

Some smaller criticisms of the game that I didn't love:

- They tried to go for a premium currency and loot grading system that just reeks in a single player game. Unacceptable. Alas, development of the game has ceased, and the Legendary Edition of this game includes ALL content.

- Some of the mission variety, particularly Story missions (move critical path/plot forward), left a bit to be desired. I never minded General missions (mostly side/optional missions) having recognisable presets, but to launch into Story missions and often have them padded out by the same presets as General missions was disappointing at times.

- Not a big fan of level scaling enemies, and the enemies in this game will do so until you reach max "normal" levels, after which there are "heroic" levels where you begin to eclipse them. This almost felt like an irrelevance to explain, but I was just shy of max level after finishing the game, so enemies scaled for my whole playthrough.

- That this game fell under the radar so hard, I never got more DLC expansions. We could have had Thor! And Squirrel Girl!

That's about it. I strongly recommend this game. If "Marvel XCOM Mass Effect Card Battler" speaks to you at all, you need to try this.

Good, casual game to play for 30 min or 3 hours. Great if you're into Marvel mythos.

Great narrative and turn based combat with deck building.