Last year I played through Midnight Suns. At the time I said:

I’m thinking I’ll take a break to wait for the final DLC to land (4 new heroes with custom side-stories) then try an Ultimate 3 New Game+.

That’s exactly what I did, in addition to collecting 100% achievements.

DLC adds four new characters, each with their own card pool and mechanic, unique story levels and modifications to the strategic layer. I’ll also review Hulk here, because you access him so late in the first story line that I barely had a chance to use him.

It’s still fundamentally the same game, but I enjoyed the variation. Overall the run took about 60 hours, but with much more time in missions and less in dialogue than last time.

New Missions & Characters

While there were clear story missions associated with the new characters, the story lines seemed mostly intertwined. Vampyres were the primary new gimmick, which spawned based on number of cards played rather than turns. This led to some interesting decision making: spawning on last play for turn was usually bad.

Hulk

Mechanic: Rage. Gain offence when attacked, lose it when attacking. Fun mechanic that led to new lines: often wanted him attacked in early rounds because getting a full five stacks of rage was a massive damage boost. Also had ability to stun. Strong hero and fun to play, balancing between building as much rage as possible while staying alive.

Deadpool

Mechanic: En Fuego. Gain offence from KOs, lose it from taking damage. Meant a bigger focus on enemy priority and taunting to other characters. Fun, but not necessarily that impactful. Took long enough to build up stacks that the mission was usually over by the time he started powering up. Particularly well scripted and acted.

Abbey upgrade: Taco truck. Discard a card for an extra move. Quite useful without being overpowered. Nice small addition.

Venom

Mechanic: Ravenous. Gains bonus offence. Starts with a full three stacks, loses one per attack and gains one per turn. Not a particularly interesting hero to play, could put out quite a lot of damage though.

Abbey upgrade: Whisper Web. Spend intel to modify general missions. Cute and helped reduce grind by often enabling selection of an alternate lead hero.

Morbeus

Mechanic: Bloodlust. Similar to Captain Marvel, but attacks gain bleed instead of increased offence. Card pool interacts with bleed, so tried to combo with him Blade but he’s really more of a lone wolf. Strong hero, particularly with Mist Form which enabled repeated conceals.

Abbey upgrade: Laboratory. Enhance attributes like resilience and crit chance by decreasing another stat. Felt broken because stats can’t go below zero, so many applications had no effective downside.

Storm

Mechanic: Next turn. Many cards gain a buff by holding them for a turn. Not that interesting, but general card pool had a sub-theme of stuns and resist which made her fun (and powerful) to play.

Abbey upgrade: Enhanced threat room. Didn’t use it. May as well just do regular missions?

Light Hunter

I used a light hunter this time instead of dark. Modified Heal provided health and resist stacks, Morningstar built up to high damage particularly on story missions. With two free cards in Wrath and Call to Arms, as well as Paragon Collar on every fifth play, Hunter levelled extremely fast. Achieved paragon level 50 by the final mission. Those cards also made a 10-heroism Annihilation a straightforward way to end most general missions.

New Game+

In New Game+ you keep all the cards and friendships from your first play through. I liked this because it meant I could focus on the friendships and characters I neglected in my first run. Since I also needed to level and befriend four new characters, I did many more general missions. Harder difficulty level meant faster levelling, and so I finished with everyone at level 25 and most with multiple paragon levels — much higher than the level ~20 I finished my last run with.

Bosses have a large amount of health at Ultimate 3, and this became a bit grindy when I’d already locked in a win (e.g. KOed everything else on the mission) but still had to take multiple turns to wear them down. Many could also one-hit KO most heroes with particular attack roles which always felt unfair at the time, though in practice out of over 100 missions I only had to restart four.

I didn’t talk about items much in my first review. I would have liked some motivation to rotate through them more. For most missions I took the same “power three” just in case I got into trouble (i.e. fallen villain appearing, needing bleed to distract Revenants), but didn’t often have to use them. By the end of the game I had maybe twenty items accumulated that I never used. I’m not sure what mechanical alterations I’d make to fix this though. Random items per mission might be interesting?

100% Achievements

There’s nothing particular novel about the achievements for this game, they’re mostly “complete the story” and “collect all the cards”. There are a handful of fun in-mission ones related to specific mechanics (e.g. stun four with Storm on a single turn, deplete and refill Venom’s ravenous meter) but these were only a single dedicated mission each to collect.

Level five friendship with everyone was required, which meant more time spent on general missions to build them all up. I took Hunter on every mission to maximise friendship gain, and as a result she ended up much more powerful than other heroes. I would have liked more forced non-Hunter missions. The final DLC mission, Dracula’s Tomb, was perhaps the only one and as a result took some planning to get the characters working together properly (I failed my first attempt.)

Annoyingly, Abbey-related achievements (e.g. Spread The Pain, You Have The Lead) had no in-game tracking so I made a spreadsheet to track by hand, which I resented. Or in the case of ones I really didn’t care about (finding all havens) I looked up a walkthrough video rather than spend an hour wandering around outside.

Least fun achievement is a tie between “pet the dog on fifteen consecutive days” (don’t miss one!), “pet the cat four times” (but it appears randomly and doesn’t show on map), and “collect ten of each reagents”. The latter in particular because Wundergore one appears randomly, sporadically, and only every three nights(!) I hated collecting reagents to begin with. Not a mechanic that should ever have been in the game.

Overall DLC was time and money well spent. I wouldn’t go out of your way to get all achievements though.