Marvel’s Midnight Suns PC Version Report — By the light of day

It’s finally time to kick some ass as Marvel heroes using card loadouts and tactics. Marvel’s Midnight Suns just released and its PC version is the best way to play. That’s not to say it doesn’t have any issues, which it does. The biggest one, as with previous 2K games from recent times, is the 2K Launcher. This launcher is awful enough that, at worst, it can render the game unplayable. When I first went to start, the launcher popped up and then vanished. After I tried running the game again, this time the launcher didn’t vanish. Instead, it said it was loading indefinitely and refused to let me play the game.

In order to make Marvel’s Midnight Suns playable, I had to set the game to ignore the launcher via launch options. Once I did this, the game booted up fine. Why does every giant publisher think it needs to inflict its paying customers with a pointless launcher? You’re already making money hand over fist, you don’t need to make your games more cumbersome to play and steal more of our personal information. At least it’s easy enough to get out of the way, which is a small comfort.

As for the game’s performance, it varies. At 1440p and max settings with a 3090 and 2600x, I got a solid 100+ fps during the game’s combat sequences. These are, of course, turn-based tactical encounters, so the extra frames are far from necessary. In the game’s real-time cutscenes and free movement sections, however, it was a different story. I mostly hovered around 50 fps, albeit with some hitching as the framerate went up and down. I wasn’t expecting a turn-based tactics game to do this, but it’s a AAA title, so I really shouldn’t be surprised. However, the game is perfectly playable, even if some people are having similar issues with frame drops that are very possibly exacerbated by the launcher. And now, the video and graphics menus.

Click to rule

Marvel’s Midnight Suns uses actual fullscreen and also includes borderless. By default, it loaded using borderless set at 720, which I’m getting pretty sick of seeing. Naturally, you have to set it to fullscreen or windowed to change the resolution.

Screenshot by PC Invasion

As you’d expect from a AAA game, Marvel’s Midnight Suns has fairly impressive visuals. The default anti-aliasing is TXAA, there’s ray-tracing, and motion blur is on by default. Because turn-based games totally need motion blur. I don’t believe there’s HDR, but it could be hidden in one of the menus. The game’s visuals are much more demanding in the third-person sections, such as the heavily wooded area outside the Abbey.

Screenshot by PC Invasion

You can fully rebind mouse and keyboard controls. The PC version of Marvel’s Midnight Suns is obviously the best way to control the game as you can just select everything with your mouse. Despite this, the game has controller support if you want to play it from the couch. I’m pretty happy with the game itself but still very unhappy with 2K’s launcher. At its best, it was needless, but here it actively makes the game harder to play. And for what?