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Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a new Avengers tactics game

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Marvel’s Midnight Suns was announced today at the Gamescom 2021 Opening Night Live. Developed by Firaxis, Midnight Suns will be a tactics game where players will play as a newly created character known as The Hunter. It was revealed that this character was created for this game by Firaxis with approval from Marvel.

The Hunter will be a fully customizable character who will fight alongside iconic Marvel characters. Some characters revealed in the trailer were Wolverine, Doctor Strange, Ironman, The Gloom, the Robert Reyes Ghost Rider, and Blade.

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The trailer showed off the various Marvel characters resurrecting The Hunter, who they need in order to help fight their mother, Lilith, the Mother of Demons. Midnight Suns will also have an emphasis on character relationships. Which characters you bring to battle and who you talk to in the game will shape the relationship you will have with them.

The trailer also showed off the iconic Marvel characters wearing costumes with magical runes on them. This might be a nod to the Original Sins comic crossover event from 2014. The title for the game itself, Midnight Suns, is a reference to a group of magical heroes in the Marvel Universe.

Midnight Suns is being developed by Firaxis, a company known for its iconic tactics series XCOM. The trailer did not show off any gameplay content, but players can expect something similar to the XCOM games. During the Opening Night Live event for Gamescom, it was announced that a gameplay trailer will be released on September 1.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns will be released on March 22.

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Andrew Zucosky
Andrew has been playing video games since he was a small boy, and he finally got good at them like a week ago. He has been in…
Marvel’s Midnight Suns for Nintendo Switch canceled ahead of last-gen launch

Superhero strategy game Marvel's Midnight Suns is getting its long-delayed Xbox One and PS4 port on May 11, but there's some bad news for Nintendo Switch owners: The Switch version of the game has been canceled.
2K Games and Firaxis released Marvel's Midnight Suns, a card-based strategy game focusing on the supernatural side of the Marvel comic book universe, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S last December. While Digital Trends enjoyed the game, it underperformed financially and the game's director left Firaxis altogether following its release. Originally slated to launch alongside the current-gen versions of Midnight Suns in October 2022, the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch versions of the game were indefinitely delayed when the game was pushed to December.

Now, the PS4 and Xbox One ports will finally come out digitally alongside the Blood Storm expansion on May 11, but 2K confirmed in the press release announcing the date that "the Nintendo Switch version of Marvel's Midnight Suns will no longer be offered as part of updated plans."
Additionally, the release calls Blood Storm the "final" DLC for Midnight Suns, so it seems unlikely that the game will continue to receive lots of post-launch support, unlike other Firaxis titles such as Sid Meier's Civilization VI and XCOM 2. That's certainly a more muted ending than one would expect from a Marvel game from the industry's premier strategy developers.
Marvel's Midnight Suns will finally launch for PS4 and Xbox One on May 11. It's currently available for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. 

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Marvel Snap road map reveals new competitive mode, token shop rework

Second Dinner released a road map that revealed several significant updates coming to Marvel Snap over the next couple of months, including a new competitive mode called Conquest and revamps of the mobile card game's Token Shop and ranked modes.
The developer went into more detail about all of these features in Marvel Snap's in-game blog. Conquest was thoroughly explained, and we learned it's a competitive version of Friendly Battles' health-based fights. Conquest mode will be split into multiple leagues (Proving Grounds, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Vibranium, Infinite), and players must win three consecutive battles in one to move up to the next and get better rewards. Players will be rewarded with Conquest medals, which can then be used in a new cosmetic-driven Conquest Shop. This major new feature is expected to launch in June, but some updates are coming before then.
In Marvel Snap's next patch, Second Dinner will increase the number of Collector's Tokens players get from opening Collector's Caches and Collector's Reserve, and add the ability for players to claim a free Series 3 card once per season. This should shorten the amount of time it takes to get new cards, and set the stage for a Token Shop revamp in April. That rework will make the Marvel Snap Token Shop much more comprehensive by featuring new Series 5 cards in a weekly spotlight and giving Series 4 and 5 cards their own dedicated shop sections.
More modes and easier card acquisition have been some of the most-requested things from Marvel Snap players since launch, so it's great that Second Dinner will finally deliver on these fronts in the coming months. 

Looking at the long term, the road map also teases several features that are in the development in concept stages at Second Dinner. These updates include widescreen support on PC, Smart Decks, the ability to equip avatars and titles by deck, personalized shops, global matchmaking, social Guilds, card emotes and emojis, mythic variants, PC controller support, season audio, and a Test Deck mode that will let players try out certain deck builds in an unranked mode against AI.
Marvel Snap is available now for PC, iOS, and Android.

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Marvel Snap is the first game to nail MCU movie tie-ins

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania hit theaters this weekend, and you will know that’s the case even if your only connection to comic books is through Marvel Snap. Throughout February, Marvel Snap is in its “Into the Quantum Realm” season. It’s all centered around content themed on that microscopic world from the new Marvel movie. It introduces cards based on Ant-Man movie characters like M.O.D.O.K., Ghost, Stature, and Kang the Conqueror, as well as new locations based on places that have been in Marvel Cinematic Universe movies like the Quantum Realm, Quantum Tunnel, Camp Lehigh, and the Sacred Timeline.
Into the Quantum Realm Season | Developer Update | February 2023
Developer Second Dinner made similar tie-in seasons for Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever last year. As a fan of both Marvel movies and Marvel video games, these Marvel Snap seasons have done a fantastic job thus far integrating the two. Marvel’s film and gaming efforts have mostly remained separate, often intentionally, since a couple of terrible tie-in games during the MCU's Phase 1.
Often, it feels like comic book games have to be  either direct tie-ins or wholly disconnected from the films in theaters at the time. However, Marvel Snap shows that any comic book game can still feel relevant to what’s happening in theaters in subtle but satisfying ways.
A seamless crossover
With each new Season of Marvel Snap, I love keeping an eye out for what's new in the card game. Because of how wildly different each round can be, new cards and locations can impact games differently every time they appear. M.O.D.O.K., in particular, opens up some interesting strategies as it can discard your entire hand upon its reveal. Before I know it, I find that I'm using new cards and looking up information on the characters and locations I am playing with.
One of the unspoken strengths of Marvel Snap is how casually it can introduce or reexpose its players to a vast amount of characters and locales from the Marvel universe. Not only is that approach good for shedding light on less popular corners of the universe, like The Savage Land, but it also makes it a good marketing and crossover tool for the latest Marvel movie.
M.O.D.O.K., Ant-Man, and the Quantum Realm are on the top of my mind right now, as Marvel Snap is one of the games I play the most. Now, I find myself a bit more excited to see Quantumania than I was based on the trailers, even after mixed reviews. That's just effective marketing.
This is technically not a direct crossover event or a brand-new tie-in game; it’s just exposing me to the right Marvel content to supplement what I’m seeing in the cultural zeitgeist. Then, once Quantumania being in theaters isn’t as relevant, Marvel Snap can move on and continue exploring new parts of the Marvel universe with future seasons.
Finding success
This seasonal tie-in approach Marvel Snap takes is an effective and clever piece of marketing that keeps me engaged with both the game and MCU films. In fact, no superhero game before has been able to tie into movies quite like this. Marvel Strike Force and Contest of Champions character cameos feel a little too ham-fisted, while Sega’s licensed Marvel games from the late 2010s were too much of a mixed bag to ever work. Marvel’s Avengers, a live service game featuring many characters getting new movies and shows, was also never able to get this cadence right.
Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania | New Trailer
While Marvel’s Avengers would get costumes based on the MCU, it rarely ever felt in line with what the MCU released at the time. Occasionally, additions like the Red Room and Jane Foster’s Mighty Thor would line up correctly, but those felt like exceptions rather than the rule when the game didn’t have a consistent seasonal structure. Even though its narrative purposefully wasn’t connected to the MCU, Marvel’s Avengers' post-launch support could have attracted more attention and even bolstered the movies had it lined things up as well as Marvel Snap has.
As Marvel’s Avengers loses support later this year, its failure to capitalize upon and enhance the game with MCU tie-ins in compelling ways can be seen as one of its many failures. It also raises questions on how future D.C. games will connect to their universe. James Gunn’s current plan seems to incorporate video games heavily, having them filling gaps in his narrative’s story rather than directly tying into a specific film or just serving as supplementary hype material like Marvel Snap.
Admittedly, the resources and effort required for a new game are very different from what’s needed for a new Marvel Snap season. Still, Second Dinner has shown how comic book movies and video games can nicely tie together without stepping on each other’s feet. Simply getting players in the correct headspace and theming for whatever’s in theaters is enough, especially if the game in question is a live service title with a seasonal structure.

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