I got this on PS5 - played about 15 hours so far so these are initial impressions.
First things first, I’m not a Marvel fan really - I’ve watched a few movies but skipped most of the later Avengers MCU stuff (so far anyway).
1) It runs very well on PS5. There’s not much DualSense support but I can’t see where they would put that in this game anyway. Other than that, it’s been smooth sailing.
2) Gameplay isn’t really like XCOM - it’s different enough to be its own thing both in the missions and the Abbey. The missions themselves don’t seem (so far) to take as long as XCOM ones although there are some caveats. Personally I like this focus on actions and tighter play areas - it allows me to focus on the meat of card play. In the context of this game, bigger play areas wouldn’t really make sense I guess.
3) So the missions are card based. Each hero contributes 8 cards and there are 3 heroes so 24 cards in your mission “deck”. However card play is impacted by playfield positioning so choosing where to move and play cards is an element of the mechanics.
Handsize is 6 and you fill up to that number each round. So while cards introduce some randomness there’s not as much card draw luck as the card based gameplay might imply. Add in that the hero card hand has composition rules coupled with a few game time mechanics, and it’s unlikely a bad card draw will cause problems.
However the cards a hero takes into battle are user configurable within the composition ruleset - I wouldn’t really call this deck building since 8 cards isn’t enough to really constitute a deck. But there are various rarities of cards and each can be upgraded.
4) The Abbey is where the heroes are outfitted with new … outfits, as well as cards. Some stuff is cosmetic, some has gameplay effects.
Yes there is the social aspect which increases cohesion between characters and the team as a whole. Doing this gives in-mission benefits.
The Abbey parts are quite deep and offer quite a lot of tinkering. Some stuff is “serious” and related to mission effects, and some is just side fun like having different outfits for hanging at the Abbey.
5) Socials and dialogue. There seems to be a lot of negativity around this, and I’m a snob when it comes to dialogue - but actually I found this to be fine so far and there’s not that much dialogue between missions - this isn’t Yakuza or an RPG or something. It’s mostly short and skippable.
The dialogue is typical of stuff like the Ironman movies - have grand world domination threat conversations, mixed in with run of the mill day to day stuff that doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s fine, there are a number of references to other movies early in the game, the characters are largely in keeping with their cinematic counterparts.
Yeah - like a lot of games the voice acting doesn’t always fit the context and the talking head animation is stilted.
But anyway, I’d say the socials here are easy enough to stomach, don’t take up that much time and are skippable if you’re not feeling it.
6) What I did find jarring about the Abbey compared to XCOM is getting around. Here you control your character so doing the busy work needs you to run around the abbey visiting places.
Some stuff can be done through menus but there is time required to get around that wasn’t there so much in XCOM.
Anyway so far I’m enjoying this a lot - it’s a surprise hit and I’ve got one eye on the DLC already.
I view the abbey stuff as a kind of Marvel playset. Just have fun with some familiar and not so familiar characters - it reminds me of those DOA titles, dating and choosing the outfits of characters there - some parts of the Abbey seem to be an ironic take on that. The missions are fun to play and while you create your own hero, they aren’t required all the time if you prefer to use other more familiar characters.
Surprise hit so far for me.