Love, Doctor Strange.
One night last week I went to a book club with Blade.
It was Blade’s idea, actually.
Captain America and Captain Marvel were there, so we were pretty much knee deep in captains.
We read The Art of War.
It was Blade’s pick.
Funny because Blade is a vampire, right?
After the book club was done I went foraging for mushrooms with Iron Man.
Incredibly, these are not the ramblings of someone who’s just banged their head on a shelf.
It’s XCOM and Fire Emblem.
We will come back to stuff like the book club in a bit.
Let’s start with the action, with the tactics, the turns and the cards.
This is Firaxis, so there’s a bit of theatre to just setting off.
In XCOM you had the Skyranger and all of your guys wedged inside waiting for the LZ.
It’s lovely stuff.
Coming from XCOM battles means fighting here took a bit of getting used to for me.
Over time it all became clear to me.
Cards can be Attacks - hit people with Captain America’s shield, if you’ve brought him along?
- or a Skill, like maybe applying counter to your allies or bleed to their attacks.
Or they can be Heroic.
Heroism is a bit like mana, but it isn’t built up automatically.
But Heroism can also be spent on other stuff.
Environmental attacks live outside of the three card plays you could make each turn.
Can you get a bunch of them to gather around a barrel of oil?
Can you get a couple of them within range of a rock you might chuck?
Any of these things might turn the tide of a battle.
And they are just the beginning of the depths here.
Some have no health at all and succumb to a single hit, great for boosting heroism.
Then there are your heroes, who each have their own focuses.
They’re as adaptable as the sliders and whatnot which control what they look like.
And the smallprint is always worth reading.
Even this is just the start of the complexities.
Last night, for example, I had an absolute peach of a mission.
It sold the superhero fantasy - and it did it all with rules.
Theres much to say about this, I imagine.
But we have to move on.
On the most basic level, it’s about making friends.
I am not here to judge.
you’ve got the option to give heroes gifts, or choose to spar with them.
(Marvel’s particularly suited to this, too, since its heroes are all so squabble-prone and imperfect.
Elsewhere, the abbey, which you move around in third-person, has plenty of XCOM-alike spaces.
Except that’s not entirely true.
That’s not all it comes down to.
But there’s also more than all that.
As with Fire Emblem, say, there’s more than just utility in play here.
Look at the book club: a whole evening chatting with Blade about what he reads.
Ditto hanging out with Captain Marvel.
It makes this stuff more than superficial due to the love and craft with which it’s all handled.
It gets you out of yourself slightly.
Who left the brie on the counter in the library?
Who’s using the superhero social connection to joke around?
I sent them out to catch ghosts and defeat demons, of course.
Batman married Summer Barbie, then they got divorced, and now Batman works at the post office.
(Cat Noir has spent 18 months in the bathroom by this point - still counting.)
