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Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass Thoughts: A Lot of Good in the Same Vein

Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass Thoughts: A Lot of Good in the Same Vein
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A few months ago, I reviewed Marvel’s Midnight Suns and found it to be a reasonably decent time. It had fun combat and tasteful art, but the problem was that it spent an insane amount of time making you jump through hoops like some show poodle rather than kicking the tar out of baddies. Now, all four DLC additional content packs have been added to the game for Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass purchasers, so how has this impacted the experience?

Let’s find out.

Now I’d say, as a person, I have a pretty decent memory for details, but upon starting up my second playthrough of Marvel’s Midnight Suns, I quickly came to realize I didn’t remember what on earth the story of this game was even about.

Interpret that as you will…

Pick Your Character

I decided to play as the female character option for Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass‘s New Game+.

New Game+ allows you to take the friendship levels (granting your companions added benefits), slightly increased damage and health values, and of course, your vital cosmetics (sarcasm) with you.

Playing as the female option, I will note that the voice acting is miles better, but the facial animations are worse. This isn’t relevant to the Season Pass content, but I just decided to throw that out there.

Playing as a female in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

The key benefit of this mode is that you also get to use all characters previously unlocked in your first playthrough, meaning you can use some favorites who might not necessarily show up until much later in the storyline.

For example, the Scarlet Witch is only available 2/3 of the way through the story after you “uncorrupt” her, and seeing as she’s such a deviously fun character to use, I was grateful to use her abilities from the jump.

The four Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass DLC packs provide an additional character each, some purchasable upgrades for your Abbey home base, as well as a few extra missions focusing on each character.

What’s more, these missions all weave together into a storyline where you are tasked with quelling a Vampyre (not vampire) infestation masterminded by the one and only Count Dracula.

The first pack gives you access to the character known as Deadpool.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass Deadpool Pack: The Good, The Bad, and the Undead

Deadpool’s unique ability is that his cards get more powerful as he wipes out more individual enemies. The tradeoff is that the moment he gets hit, he loses one stack of this buff, so you will want to either have the “hero” buzzsaw everything targeting him with impunity or pair him with tankier characters who can take hits away from the merc.

Deadpool in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

Deadpool is a great character to use because he can truly become unstoppable if left to his own devices.

What’s more, his Abbey upgrade is a Food Truck that allows you to discard a card from your hand once per encounter to gain an additional movement charge for your team.

This allows you to get rid of a “bricked” (unusable) card to reposition one of your heroes for maximum impact on the board.

It’s a pretty neat addition when you think about it. Besides the utility of moving to a more advantageous position (or getting an extra body slam in on a target), having one fewer card in your hand when you redraw at the beginning of the turn recycles your deck faster so you can get to your good stuff sooner.

As a character, he’s crazy annoying, but we knew that going in. Thankfully, Ryan Reynolds didn’t voice him, so I didn’t vomit all over my computer. If I see one more Mint mobile advertisement on my TV, I will scream….oops, just screamed.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass Venom Pack: Redemption

The next focuses on redeeming the anti-hero known as Venom, Spider-Man’s nemesis and the first miniboss you encounter in-game.

Venom in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

Venom’s Abbey upgrades revolve around minimizing the element of randomness in your mission choice. His upgrades allow you to switch the leader of a mission at the cost of “Intel,” so you can pick the entirety of your three-person squad as opposed to just two. Later, you can also add an extra resource reward to each mission that you will receive upon completion.

In terms of character, Venom is ruled by a mechanic called “Ravenous.”

He’s kind of like a reverse Hulk, where instead of getting more damage as he generates this resource, Venom will actually spend Ravenous points as he uses his damaging abilities. With every point he loses, his damage becomes weaker. Careful management of this is essential to make sure you are maximizing his usage on the battlefield because too many cards in succession from the monster render him inert.

The redemption of Eddie Brock/Venom is a bit strange from a narrative standpoint, but this is basically a superhero buddy cop movie, so it was never in the running for the Pulitzer.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass Morbius Pack: The Hunger

Next up, Dr. Michael Morbius, the “Science Vampire.”

Morbius in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

Unlike that recent movie that came out with certified freakshow Jared Leto, Morbius in this game is much more personable. His schtick is after playing a few cards; ALL his damaging abilities impart the bleed status onto targets. This is insanely useful and made me build him stacked with refundable cards and attacks that hit as many enemies at once to spread that juicy bleed all over the place.

His Abbey upgrades allow you to improve the background stats of your allies at the cost of in-game money and to the detriment of another stat. So, for instance, if you want someone to have more critical damage, you may sacrifice some resistance against status effects.

Seeing as your characters specialize in different roles anyway, you just have to be judicious about to who you apply these upgrades. I don’t need Captain America to have a more critical chance, but I do need him to regenerate health more consistently so he can keep serving as my team’s punching bag.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass Storm Pack: Blood Storm

Finally, there is Storm, my absolute favorite to use.

Storm in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

As her name suggests, Storm can command the power of the weather to turn everyone into ash in a truly electrifying display of power (I’ll see myself out).

When you leave an ability in your hand, they get stronger. While rarely the lead horse out of the gate in your encounters because of this, the wait is well worth it. Her ability to stun enemies based on how many of her cards are in your hand is also incredible.

While her Abbey upgrades improve the training room, I never bought them, so I can’t speak to their efficacy. Your boy is just so good he doesn’t need to practice, I guess; sue me.

Vampyres and a New MiniBoss

In terms of enemies, Vampyres and a new miniboss called Sin are introduced.

In case you were at all concerned that maybe the Vampyres have some good in them, the game does its utmost to label them as mindless beasts as opposed to victimized humans. Sin is also the granddaughter of the notorious Nazi and Captain America nemesis, the Red Skull.

So no qualms here about turning them inside out. By the way, maybe it’s slightly more apparent why I used the word “vein” in my title?

Vampyres in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

All Vampyres heavily use the bleed mechanic in some form or faction because, of course, they do.

The truly fascinating ones have the ability to infect some of your abilities with an extra effect that will give the hero using the card 1 bleed counter when the card is played. This can only be removed by using them or redrawing them.

More troubling is that lesser Vampyres have a chance to transform into more evolved and tougher versions when one of your team gets afflicted with bleed. This can clearly lead to everything spiraling out of control within the space of a single turn.

The single most annoying new enemy is a disgusting egg sac called a Hemalisc that constantly spawns new Vampyre enemies after you play a certain amount of abilities.

As I mentioned at some point in the word dump, known as my previous review, card battler 101 is to maximize the number of plays you can make in a single turn, and introducing an enemy that punishes you for spamming abilities is a great change of pace.

There’s a reason Slay the Spire’s most hated boss is the Time Eater.

Like other minibosses in the game, Sin can show up on random missions whenever but in her dedicated story-based encounters, she has to be obliterated twice as opposed to once when she shows up by chance. She packs a wallop, and if you attack her, she can force other minions nearby to target the attacking hero, so be sure you keep that in mind.

Deadpool in Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

Dracula is beefier than most, hits even harder than Sin does, and inflicts a lot of bleed on your heroes. When you attack him with a bleeding enemy, he has a 50% chance to counter them, and again, the guy does HEFTY amounts of damage. Bring cures and avoid that situation at all costs.

All in all, I think the Season Pass content does a decent amount of good for the game. It not only adds variance to the enemies on your kill list but also allows you to use heroes who revolve around underused mechanics in the base game. Blade was originally the only character with reliable access to bleed, so having Morbius is a nice refresher.

Likewise, Storm’s heavy usage of area-of-effect attacks and stuns reminds me of the Hulk, but she’s not as one-dimensional. The “save your cards until the next round to improve them” mechanic is a staple in a lot of card battlers, and it’s nice that they added it to this game.

Scene from Marvel's Midnight Suns Season Pass

However, Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass does not address my initial criticism of too much busy work and, in fact, exacerbates the issue by introducing more things to grind for.

Dracula is a tough, tough, tough boss as well, so if you plan to complete that storyline, you will need to level up these four new heroes (and Blade) to the maximum with an arsenal of top-tier abilities.

I think if you’re ready for the grind and love the experience, Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass is a good buy, but at 15 bucks a pop per pack or $50 for all four, that’s a bit steep. Wait for a sale, and see if you can get all four of them at a discount, would be my recommendation.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns Season Pass is available in single-character packs for $14.99 each from Epic and Steam, or you can buy all four packs for $49.99 on Steam, Epic, Playstation, and Xbox.

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