The ‘friendship simulator’ aspect has been overly expressed as a negative in reviews. That review angle is giving a good game a poor impression. Improving the heroes does involve raising their level of friendship with the player’s hero (“The Hunter”). Instead of chopping down trees and breaking rocks with a pickaxe, then refining the raw materials, then crafting improvements, you instead have conversations with the other heroes. Ever read a comic? In-between the fights the heroes talk to each other. The friendship building is a different take on typical resource gathering. The various dialogs involved are entertaining. Good. Not great, but good.

It is not XCOM like. That is like saying any game that has tough melee fights is ‘souls like’. The combat is turn-base card deck building. The hero powers are cards. Each hero has a character themed set of cards. You acquire cards for each hero and assign/change a set of 8 active cards for each hero from their specific set. Most fights combine 3 hero’s set of 8 active cards into the deck used for that fight. Cards are randomly drawn from that combined deck throughout that fight. Each card does a specific thing. Never a random chance to hit or miss. Never a random amount of damage. No ‘action point’ choice of move or attack. 3 card plays and 1 move per combat turn done in any order. The only randomness is the drawing of cards.

First thing: I love this game.

I'm writing this as a negative review because 2K Games is pulling shady stuff. I bought this game a while back. Now when I try to sign in, I can't play the game until I agree to a privacy update that gives them permission to share and sell not only data related to this game, but my browser activity and other things.

No. Full stop, no.

But the only way to "opt out" is to go to their website, put in a data request, and wait up to a month to have someone reach out and "talk about your options" basically. No thank you. I will never buy another game from 2K if they're holding my purchased game hostage until I allow them to make more money off of selling my data to other people (and not cutting me in on it!). I should be able to play my purchased game as much as I want.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is such an underrated gem. It has everything a Marvel fan wants, and I personally loved the dialogue writing for each character. The gameplay features a well structured system for unlocking each character, along with brief introductions for them. Every character is well balanced across different difficulties, and they've done a great job with the tactical RPG mechanics.