Last year saw the release of a big-budget game starring Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Wolverine, and a ton of other iconic Marvel heroes. It was created by Firaxis, the developer behind the critically lauded, commercially successful XCOM games. It was really good. And no one played it.
If you knew about Marvel’s Midnight Suns, congrats, you are one of the few. If you played it, congrats you’re one of the fewer. It’s a shame that the game sold so poorly because, despite being sick to death of the MCU, I’m having a great time with it. I’m only about 15-20 hours in, but if it keeps it up, it’s one of the best triple-A games I’ve played in years.
A lot of factors held the game back. It’s one of the only console and PC Marvel games to launch since the failure of Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel’s Avengers, which may have conditioned general audiences to expect it to be a live service behemoth. In reality, it’s a card-based strategy game which is significantly more niche than an open-world Spider-Man or an Avengers brawler. It launched on December 1, which is a terrible time for any game to launch if it wants awards or press attention. That late 2022 release also meant that it didn’t get to stay in the conversation throughout the year as more people discovered it.
All of those things are factors but I also suspect that Midnight Suns got hit by the same superhero fatigue that’s currently plaguing Marvel and DC at the movies. With the exception of Spider-Man: No Way Home, no MCU movie post-Endgame has cracked a billion dollars at the box office. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania bombed, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever underperformed the original by about $500 million globally. Things are worse for DC, which had Black Adam and Shazam: Fury of the Gods bomb back to back. James Gunn, who wrote and directed Marvel’s next film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, before switching sides to run DC Studios, has said that “there is such a thing as superhero fatigue.” Though Guardians 3 will give us a better sense of which way the wind is blowing long term, audiences seem to be experiencing that fatigue.
And I’m right there with them. I’m cautiously excited for Guardians, but after that, I would love to see the MCU scale back to, like, one movie a year. And I think the expectation that audiences keep up with multiple Disney+ shows in order to be prepared for the widest releases of the year has made a lot of more casual Marvel fans feel the same way. It’s a shame that a game as good as Midnight Suns is suffering from creative decisions being made by people in a whole other industry.
In fact, Midnight Suns is good enough that it’s reminding me why I like this kind of story in the first place. By having you fight alongside cool characters in battle, with their powers represented in big flashy animations, and then heading back to your hideout to play video games together, you get the feeling that you’re getting to know both halves of the character. You control and witness their heroics, but you also talk with them through their vulnerabilities. And as a lengthy tactics RPG, it has a relaxed pace that other superhero stories rarely do. You slowly get to know these icons as friends and that feels utterly different from other superhero games, movies, or TV series.
If you haven’t played Marvel’s Midnight Suns, if you shrugged it off because you’re a little sick of Marvel at this point, don’t let that put you off. It might remind you why you liked superheroes in the first place.