Marvel’s Midnight Suns holds me back from becoming a supervillain who wails on goons

God, I love wailing on goons. Ordering Captain Marvel to boot one goon into another goon, knocking both goons out. Getting Iron Man to hoof a goon into Blade so that the day-walking vampire knees them in the face for luscious extra damage. Making Spider-Man swing a crate into a dopey goon’s waiting face, knocking them out cold. Or, best of all, bringing a streetlamp down on a goon, crushing them into the ground.

Superhero games are great for satisfying my goon-waling desires. Marvel’s Spider-Man, Gotham Knights, even the less-than-stellar Marvel’s Avengers offers up some primo goon wailing, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns, the turn-based tactical title from XCOM developers Firaxis Games, continues that wonderful tradition. Though it’s a little smarter than the others, it’s the thinking person’s goon-wailer.

In the battle against the green-glowing demon Lilith and the secretive evil organization Hydra (and its large staff of wailable goons), In Midnight Suns, you need to bring together a roster of Earth’s superheroes and command them on the battlefield with a hand of cards. 

As a big fan of XCOM, I was expecting Firaxis’ take on superheroes to be much the same, with your team of gruff alien-hunting marines slipped into tight spandex, but this is a very different game to the studio’s earlier efforts, both leaning into the interplay of your heroes off the battlefield and completely changing the combat system on it. The radical changes are deeply smart choices and even manage to make me step away from my goon-wailing tendencies to play the hero every now and then.

That's just what heroes (don't) do

At the heart of XCOM’s combat are movement and cover. You want to maneuver your soldiers to flank the enemy to increase your hit chance and shoot at the Earth-invading aliens where they are vulnerable, but you also want to make sure you never leave your troops out of cover, especially as death on the battlefield will see you permanently losing your recruit – and all of their hard-earned experience and gear with them.

None of that applies in Marvel’s Midnight Suns.

For a start, your attacks don’t miss, and it doesn’t matter where the goon is on the battlefield, if you play a card, you can consider that goon wailed upon. Your hero will leap from one end of the warehouse to the other to bring their fists down on the pliant goon. Because that’s what heroes do and that’s what goons are for.

The cover system is gone, too, with your heroes happily taking a faceful of bullets and spitting them out like pistachio shells. It may hurt, but it just isn’t heroic to duck behind a low wall, even if, in another universe, it would provide a 50% increase to dodge chance.

Instead, the tension in Marvel’s Midnight Suns comes from the heroism cost of your cards and the strict limit to how many you can play in a turn. The stakes are ratcheted higher, too, because it’s not only abilities and attacks that are played as cards but actions like saving civilians, defusing bombs, and interrogating whimpering goons.

So, for players like me, who could happily whomp on goons day and night, having my heroes crisp them with photon beams, explode them with rockets, or puncture them with adamantium claws, if I want to save the day I will have to sometimes opt to leave a goon un-wailed upon, in favor of using one of my turn’s limited card plays to instead save a civilian who’s trapped under fallen rubble.

I thought my supervillain origin story would be that I was the man who wanted to wail on the very last goon, whatever the cost. But, it turns out, when the cost is card plays, I will volunteer to take the heroic path, pulling a civilian to safety before they’re crushed by Spider-Man’s nemesis, the black goop-wrapped Venom. It’s a deft bit of game design to push me into roleplaying a superhero, not by telling me to be heroic, but by working heroic actions into the tools of the game. Honestly, I’m just stunned to discover that I’m not all about goon-wailing.

Though, it certainly helps that after you’ve completed a mission’s objective, you’re often left to KO all the goons still on the map. So it’s rare for a goon to walk away unwailed. And that’s what helps me sleep at night.

• This isn't the first turn-based tactical game to turn you into a gosh darn hero.