Midnight Suns is a very fun and dynamic game. It is part tactics game, part deck-builder, and part RPG. Many of the game’s features serve to enhance the game for players, and overall playing Midnight Suns is a mostly positive experience.
While Midnight Suns is an enjoyable game, there are certain features that it could have done without. The game is massive, and some of the issues seem to stem from trying to include too many features in an already-packed game. Other problems arise from simply making certain aspects of the game more complicated than it needs to be. While none of these issues ruin the game by any stretch, they can make extended play sessions feel tedious or frustrating.
10/10 Superlink Is An Annoying Group Chat
One of the best parts of Midnight Suns is how the heroes at The Abbey will spontaneously get into conversations with one another. This also makes the annoying Superlink feature feel all the more superfluous.
Superlink is essentially if Twitter was restricted to just the members of the Midnight Suns. Characters will post something, and occasionally some of the others will reply. Players don’t get to interact with these conversations at all; they’re just there. While it isn’t a super intrusive feature, it is frustrating that the game seems to have taken a shortcut to character interaction when they proved there was a better way to do it.
9/10 Too Many Collectibles Make Players Lose Interest
When walking into a single room in Midnight Suns, players shouldn’t be surprised to find five journal entries from three characters. On top of this, there are even more collectibles and bits of currency just lying around everywhere.
Apart from feeling cluttered, this overwhelming number of collectibles makes players lose interest in finding them. If there were just a few things to find that would give players some tangible benefit, that would be one thing, but when so many hidden items are nothing more than a bit of text, there isn’t a big incentive to find them.
8/10 Components Are Both Too Easy And Too Hard To Find
Occasionally, players will be asked to collect components from around The Abbey for a club meeting. Some components don’t stick out in a meaningful way in the environment, making it somewhat difficult to grab them intentionally.
At the same time, there are also just components all over the place in the grounds surrounding The Abbey. While players might be unable to pick them out individually, simply running around and mashing the A button will likely yield a good number of ingredients. In the end, it just feels tedious and like an artificial way to slow down a player’s progress through the game.
7/10 Exploration Isn’t Very Exciting
During downtime, players can explore The Abbey and the surrounding woods. While there are some fun things to do during downtime, actually exploring the grounds can be pretty boring. It doesn’t help that many environments look exactly the same.
Exploring the grounds is sometimes necessary for advancing the plot or upgrading The Hunter. However, it is always so dull that it feels like a chore. The game is said to take between 40 and 90 hours to complete. With a game with so much content, cutting down on more boring parts could make it feel like a more streamlined experience.
6/10 Battlefields All Feel The Same
Battlefields in Midnight Suns may technically vary, but they all feel the same after a while. The most meaningful difference in environments comes from whether or not there is something to throw the enemy off of.
Environments change, but when they do, it is largely an aesthetic change as opposed to a functional one. Midnight Suns does a great job keeping the game fresh through new abilities and consistent upgrades. It would have been nice to see the game adding some variety to the battlefield in meaningful ways.
5/10 There Isn’t A Lot Of Enemy Variety
To say that there is no variety to the enemies in Midnight Suns would be unfair, but what variety there is doesn’t feel as meaningful as it should. While the fallen supervillains are all fun to play against in different ways, regular enemies tend to fall into a few categories.
There are heavy enemies that can take a lot of hits, mid-sized enemies that will go down with just a couple of moves or one strong one, and light enemies that go down with a single blow. Even though they get reskinned, it often feels like the same enemy types. For a good amount of hours, players will be facing off against generic Hyrda goons with the occasional supervillain intervention.
4/10 Collecting Loot Is Tedious
Like any RPG that involves upgrading characters, there is a decent amount of loot involved in Midnight Suns. The problem isn’t with the volume of rewards players get from each mission, but in how this loot is actually redeemed.
After each mission, players will often get one or more capsules containing some upgrades or currency. However, players don’t simply see what they get at the end of a mission. Instead, they have to go to a specific place in The Abbey, talk to a character, and watch the same animation each time they want to open one of these capsules. It makes simply collecting rewards a frustratingly slow experience when the items could easily just be added to the player’s inventory after a mission.
Similar to collecting loot, upgrades can only be purchased at specific locations in The Abbey. This means a lot more running around and going through different menus to get through all the upgrading that needs to be done.
The most frustrating thing about this is that players can see what skills are available for upgrade in their menu. However, there is no button to upgrade it there. The game could easily allow players to manage their skills, upgrades, and research from a single menu and cut down on wasted time.
2/10 There Are Too Many Kinds Of Currency
It can sometimes be difficult to keep track of what resources players have available to them in Midnight Suns. Part of this is that there are just too many different types of in-game currency to keep track of.
For purchasing cosmetic upgrades for heroes or the player’s room, there is Gloss. Then there are Credits for upgrading different parts of The Abbey. For upgrading cards, there are three different kinds of currency, Attack Essence, Skill Essence, and Heroic Essence. On top of all that, there are also Eclipse Credits, a premium currency that costs real money. Keeping all this straight can be a hassle. The game could easily have given players one or two currencies in larger quantities instead of splitting them up in many ways.
1/10 Skins Cost Real Money
Cosmetic options are always a fun option in games. In superhero games, they can be especially exciting because they often reference fan-favorite costumes from the comics. Unfortunately, a lot of the cosmetic options in Midnight Suns are going to cost players real money to get.
Cosmetic options aren’t necessary for the game, and players can still enjoy themselves without buying them. Still, it’s a little disappointing to click on a cool costume in a hero’s customization menu only to find out they’re only available through the $50 season pass or the purchase of Eclipse Credits.
