As usual, I’m way late to the party on this one, so late that I bought this a while back on Steam and still hadn’t played it when Epic offered it for free. I did read up on opinions about it when it was first released and now that I’ve finished it, my thoughts are largely the same. It’s a fantastically original take on the turn-based tactics type of game that are now sometimes called the XCOM alike. But it has a staggering amount of out-of-combat story and exploration content that is way out of whack compared to the tactical gameplay. This ended up being a commercial failure which is why it was offered for free on Epic so quickly and that’s a real shame because the gameplay is really good and this is an excellent use of the Marvel license.

Here the player takes on the role of an original and customizable superhero character known simply as the Hunter. After Hydra scientist Doctor Faustus resurrects the demonic Lilith, her forces attack and besiege the Sanctum Sanctorum. Leaving Wanda Maximoff behind to maintain the wards, Doctor Strange leads the Avengers to the Abbey to enlist the aid of the Midnight Suns. They are led by the Caretaker, Lilith’s sister before she was corrupted by the Elder God Chthon. Together they resurrect the person who defeated Lilith before, the Hunter who also happens to be Lilith’s son. When they return to the Sanctum, they discover that Lilith has corrupted Venom as well and covered the entire building with the symbiote material. Spider-Man appears to lead Venom away but the superheroes are unable to retake the Sanctum and soon even Wanda Maximoff is corrupted, taking on a demonic form. Soon the crisis grows to global proportions as Lilith’s objective becomes clear: to obtain the Darkhold and use it to summon Chthon back to the world.

As with the various XCOM titles, the superheroes are based out of the Abbey and venture out to complete missions. There are clearly marked story missions which advance the main storyline and randomly generated general missions which you can carry out as much as you want to grind for needed resources. At the Abbey, you manage the decks of the heroes, unlock and upgrade cards, and there are lots of little things that are helpful in battle such as getting items, modding cards and getting temporary buffs. Most of all however, you socialize with the other heroes a lot and you can explore the grounds around the Abbey to learn more of the backstory of the Hunter, the Caretaker, Lilith and Agatha Harkness. The Abbey exploration part is optional but you won’t get the full story of what happened without doing it. Socializing with the heroes helps you become friends with them and they get very powerful buffs as the relationship status improves.

The thing is, the writing in this game is surprisingly good. I don’t like how the main story involves the heroes losing over and over again until the winning condition pops up out of nowhere just to keep raising the stakes but I can live with it. The plot works well enough and the missions take you to the Sanctum, Avengers Tower, Hydra bases and more. It’s great how many heroes are involved and the writing cleverly pits the adult and better established Avengers against the upstart Midnight Suns. There are a truly shocking number of scripted interactions between the characters, so you get Doctor Strange and Iron Man locking horns together, Ghost Rider and Spider-Man playing video games and so much more. Quite a few of the characters here are new to me, such as Nico Minoru, and the familiar ones are based on the comic characters rather than the MCU versions. As far as I can tell, the writers get their personalities and backstories just right, no mean feat when there are so many of them and so many elements in play.

The gameplay is great too and genuinely novel. It’s like both a tactical squad-based combat game and a card game. Each hero has their own deck and you collectively draw a hand from the combined decks. You only get a limited number of card plays a turn and your hand is automatically refreshed every turn. Most cards cost nothing to play and generate heroic points. Heroic cards which tend to have more dramatic effects cost these points to play. You can also expend them to interact with the environment as a form of attack, vaulting over an object to drop down on an enemy for example, without playing a card. Many cards break these rules of course, so a quick attack refunds the card play if you KO an enemy with it. It’s very satisfying to use knockback effects to pinball enemies around or knock them into an explosive. Appropriately for a superhero game, there are no cover mechanics. Everyone stands in place and takes it on the chin. The deck building mechanics are fine too, with the usual different rarities of cards available for each hero and you can upgrade them in many ways.

The character models in this game aren’t that high quality and some characters like Captain America can look grotesquely bloated with exaggerated muscles. But in action they look fantastic as the animations are so well done. The voice acting is good too so everyone sounds as you’d expect them to. One issue is that this shouldn’t be a very demanding game yet it feels janky at times and seems poorly optimized. The climactic battle is amazing but pushes the game to its limits, leading to poor performance even on my fairly beefy system. There are also some bugs which were never fixed, including lines of dialogue that don’t mesh with what has previously been said, and bonuses that should be unlocked but aren’t. The game seems to have been abandoned by the developers after its commercial failure.

The main reason for that I think is the game’s very bad pacing. Most players would probably go in expecting this to be a mainly a tactical combat game with some character building moments in between. In fact, you’ll spend much more time with the dialogue and scripted story encounters. It’s very weird that in the middle of a global crisis, the heroes want to hang out and play video games or throw a birthday party. The writing justifies it by saying that all work and no play drive even superheroes insane but it still feels silly. Considering that you usually take on missions with a team of three heroes and you only do one mission a day, that’s a lot of downtime for the heroes while civilians are dying out in the world. There’s just no sense of urgency. For example, a story mission ends with Venom chasing Spider-Man around New York City. The next story mission picks up from there but several days might pass while you’re doing other stuff. Are we to believe that they’ve been at it all this time?

In the same vein, the Abbey is a much larger area than you’d initially expect. Unlocking all of the zones, solving the puzzles and picking up the collectibles will take a significant chunk of your time and there’s no combat involved, except for the trials that take place in special areas of their own. You can skip all of that, but you’d be missing out a big portion of the story. It also adds to the sense of imbalance because the arenas where the fights take place are so tiny and you never get to freely roam through the areas where the missions take place. It’s all handled through cutscenes and then, bam, straight into a fight. I really do like this game but making the Abbey so expansive was probably a mistake that turned off many players. Many of the rewards that come from the Abbey-related activities are also cosmetic in nature, which I don’t really care about.

It’s a real shame because this really is a clever way to represent superhero battles and it’s easily one of the best comic book to video game adaptations I’ve seen. Having to use an original character as the hero is kind of boring and I’d hoped to see more named villains, but the writing is on point with the characterizations of the well-known and it’s so satisfying to see their interactions play out. Where else would you get Ghost Rider and Spider-Man tinkering with gadgets in a garage, or Wolverine and Captain Marvel as members of a book club? The pacing is problematic but I liked how it shows hints of how other heroes all over the world and SHIELD are also doing their part. There are a lot of execution issues but these can all be ironed out in later games. Unfortunately it isn’t looking like there ever will be a sequel because Firaxis seems to prefer to forget that this exists.