Marvel's Midnight Suns

There's a lot to love about Marvel's Midnight Suns. The combat offers a rewardingly tactical experience, with a deckbuilding card system ensuring that randomness challenges the player, not frustrates them. Plus, the mission variety and cast of diverse playable characters keep combat fresh across dozens of hours.

Like Nico, Midnight Suns wants to storm into your room and pull you by the arm into the party. Whether that's what every strategy head wants is to be determined. But if you can meet Firaxis on its own terms, you'll be dazzled.

I did not expect to be thinking about this stuff in a game that also encourages me to get the absolute most out of my battlefield resources, in a game that contains a spell which, if used correctly, allows you to rain enemy dogs down from the sky to their thudding detriment. But that's Marvel, I guess, with those flawed heroes whose powers are accompanied by vanities and vulnerabilities. And that's Firaxis, whose teams, when I once visited the studio, worked in little collegiate huddles in a selection of rooms that remind me of the dorms in the abbey, and who know that a good HQ is always more than just a fancy way of accessing a menu.