Since the topic came back to life recently, I may as well post my opinion on the game...
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I bought the game one month after release (when it was already on sale for a 33% discount, as if that wasn't a bad sign) and after my first playthrough I can summarize my impression this way:
- Combat is great. Fun, simple but with decent depth, visually pleasing.
- Heroes offer a massive variety in playstyle, to a degree not even the XCOM classes could approach.
BUT
- maps/missions are too few in variety and the same goes for the enemy types, which lead to a strong sense of repetition fairly quickly, even by XCOM standards. War of the Chosen was far more diversified.
- The Abbey exploration is mildly enjoyable
- "Social liking" with heroes is a fucking chore and dialogues are seldom interesting or amusing to witness.
- writing is bland as hell and occasionally even a bit cringey. In all fairness the same was true for the XCOM franchise, but at least everything related to narrative there had the courtesy to sideline itself most of the time, while here it pretends to take front and center.
- as already pointed, the resources system had the bad aftertaste of something aimed to the mobile/free to play market and not organic to the game.
- the level up/progression system feels almost completely vestigial. Everyone keeps bumping up their stats bit by bit and so do enemies, which in the end it makes it stat bloat for the sake of it that doesn't really add much to the game. This and the "gatcha"-inspired system to open containers to unlock new cards leave the bad impression to be a Skinner's box for the sake of it.
- I'm still not convinced making it a card game rather than a cooldown based system like its [pseudo]predecessors was so fundamental to its core mechanics nor crucial to avoid having "RNG elements in combat" , but... Oh well, you don't even pay any attention to it after a while.
Some parts of the game feel like a jewel, but at time they also feel like the proverbial diamond in the rough as they are drowned in unnecessary subsystems and pacing issues.
Is it fun? Abso-fucking-lutely. Well, most of the times, especially in combat. Is it an improvement over the studio's previous output? No, it definitely isn't.
The action adventure/dating sim angle is not as lean and enjoyable as the base building/management in War of the Chosen and what's worse, I can see becoming even more grating on repetition after a first playthrough.
That said, it DOES have part of its design that feel like they would add a lot to their future titles. The knockback system is a blast to play around with, for instance, and IF XCOM 3 is something that exist and Firaxis is actively developing at the moment, I hope it will find its way in it.
Same goes for the occasional chance to make use of environmental props to attack the enemy.
Decided to buy the game recently for 10 bucks. I am enjoying it quite a bit, actually. I would say it's mainly for the reason you mentioned where all the characters offer quite a variety in gameplay styles.
It's funny, I love XCOM games, but I kind of disliked how there weren't any "unique" characters as part of your squad. Think Orlandu or Agrias from Final Fantasy Tactics as an example. Characters with unique "classes" and abilities that also may take part in the storyline. Midnight Suns is basically ONLY that, lol.
Why did I wait for a DEEP sale to buy it? I freaking hated the demo....and it was all because of the shithead characters, lol. The game basically starts out with both Stark and Strange acting like asshats and getting completely humiliated by a bunch of teenagers.
Like many others, I have gotten pretty fed up with current day Disney trash. Things like She-Hulk shitting on Hulk, Rey shitting on Luke, etc. So I immediately got huge red flags from this game with characters like Nico and Magik taking a dump on a couple of Avengers. I was pretty much like, "F this trash" and uninstalled the demo.
The other thing was the decision to go with this card based system. I really didn't give it a chance at the time and that shitty dialogue just sealed the deal.
Then a few weeks ago I decided on a whim to check the price. Saw it was 10 bucks and said "what the hell" and picked it up.
So Nico and Magik are still insufferable twats (do they get better?), but most of the other characters have grown on me a bit. Captain Marvel is WAY better here than in the MCU (probably not saying much). There seems to be TONS of dialogue in between every mission. Each character seems to have their thoughts about EVERYTHING that happens in the story. Even the DLC ones, which I ended up buying. A lot of people seem to hate the dialogue stuff, but I don't mind it too much.
I am still not even that far in the story, though. So maybe it will get repetitve by the end. We will see.
Still, kind of a shame that this bombed since I would have liked to see their take on even more heroes. But I guess buying it from CDKeys for 10 bucks didn't help, lol.