Video Game Chat Thread - Pre-Alpha Experimental Version

Are videogames for children?


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Looking back I'm annoyed Valve dealt a massive blow to Teamfortress 2's community servers years ago. The simple act of making the official casual servers front and center instead of the community servers caused a very significant decline in community server population.

Many custom maps, custom game modes and server communities died out because of it. And then Valve effectively abandoned TF2, bots starting running rampant making casual mode unplayable and the only place you can now find a bot free match is ironically on the same community servers they killed off.

In my opinion they should of just kept the server UI the same and mixed official valve servers in with the community servers instead of doing this quick play bullshit.
 
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I never should have won this and fucked up my strategy immensely, but I wanted to highlight the ninja enemy tank destroyers that somehow took the long route through the city managing to avoid detection the entire time (and would have fucked up my units on obj. Moon if it didn't end.
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Hi-Fi Rush is amazing and scratched every itch I've had for a long time when it comes to vidya, it's really fun and doesn't take itself too seriously. The story is very basic and uninteresting, but everything else is almost perfect. Too bad Shinji Mikami left Tango Gameworks, that really sucks. But since it was bought out by Bethesda/Micro$oft I definitely get why he fucked off.
 
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Anybody here played Marvel's Midnight Suns. Apparently it didn't do very well and I ignored it for the longest time because I don't like card games. But turns out it's only superficially a card game and is actually a very well-designed tactical game. I put the difficulty up every time it let me and figuring out sequences and combinations to pull off each victory was a real challenge. It also switches things up continuously. That point in most strategy games where you've worked out the best approach and you're just going through the final parts using the same tactics over and over? Never hit that in this game as I'm forced to adapt to different problems and opponents frequently.

Also, the game is massive. Outside of combat there's a fairly substantial environment to explore and an insane amount of dialogue recorded for the NPCs for the relationship building parts of the game. The Marvel characters are actually really well-written and lean more towards the comics than the MCU movies.

If anybody wants me to sperg about this game I will happily do so. But anyway, WAAAAAY more fun and deep than I expected. Right up into the final battle I was still working out new tricks and strategies.
 
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Anybody here played Marvel's Midnight Suns. Apparently it didn't do very well and I ignored it for the longest time because I don't like card games. But turns out it's only superficially a card game and is actually a very well-designed tactical game. I put the difficulty up every time it let me and figuring out sequences and combinations to pull off each victory was a real challenge. It also switches things up continuously. That point in most strategy games where you've worked out the best approach and you're just going through the final parts using the same tactics over and over? Never hit that in this game as I'm forced to adapt to different problems and opponents frequently.

Also, the game is massive. Outside of combat there's a fairly substantial environment to explore and an insane amount of dialogue recorded for the NPCs for the relationship building parts of the game. The Marvel characters are actually really well-written and lean more towards the comics than the MCU movies.

If anybody wants me to sperg about this game I will happily do so. But anyway, WAAAAAY more fun and deep than I expected. Right up into the final battle I was still working out new tricks and strategies.
Sperg out please. I thought it was basically xcom with marvel characters. The marketing of the game was shit tbh, and I assumed it was an xcom clone with plenty of gay monitisation
 
Sperg out please. I thought it was basically xcom with marvel characters. The marketing of the game was shit tbh, and I assumed it was an xcom clone with plenty of gay monitisation
Would love to!

I'll come across as a bit of a fanboy but honestly I'm blown away by this game, so it can't really be helped. Just to start with your initial comments - yes, that seems to be the overwhelming impression people have that it's a Marvel-themed X-Com clone. It's turn-based, it's made by the same people who made X-Com (or at least company) but beyond that they're really not similar at all. You have general things common to many games like you level up your characters but the missions in MMS take place in a modestly sized arena, you get a number of card plays each turn and a hand of cards from which to play them. I wish I could drop the term cards because "card game" is what immediately put me off the game when I saw it. I could just call them powers and everything would be the same but they chose to make them look like cards visually and it's what they call them so it's just too much work to rewrite their terminology for the sake of preconceptions. The level of tactical depth you get from them is great, though.

The other thing you mentioned was DLC and micro-transactions. The game is massive. It's more than complete without DLC, absolutely. There are four announced DLC - each being an additional character, accompanying series of special story missions and lots of expanded dialogue and voice acting. There are special costumes you can buy for your characters but it's 100% cosmetic and far from important - that's it for micro-transactions. I just ignored it. I did buy one of the DLCs because I was enjoying the game so much. The four additional characters are Venom, Morbius (yes, really), Deadpool and Storm.

So anyway, I'm going to go full sperg here and divide this up into sections.

1. The set up.

So in this game you play an original character named "The Hunter" who is brought back from the dead to aid a group of Marvel heroes called The Midnight Suns defeat the Big Bad Lilith. Your character happens to be her child who managed to defeat her a few hundred years ago. The Midnight Suns are a lesser known group from the comics though some of their members are better known like Blade and Ghost Rider.

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The party is also crashed / aided by the Avengers who pretty clearly think the Midnight Suns are a bit too junior to deal with world level threats. And they're not entirely wrong but it does lead to various tensions between the characters.

As the game goes on you add more and more heroes to your line-up and from this roster you pick people for missions. Sometimes there are particular hero requirements, mostly you can pick the three you think are best / want to level up / feel like playing with and your character doesn't have to be one of the three, either. Missions are self-contained battles that take place over a usually unlimited number of turns but 3-6 turns is how it mostly plays out. Outside of missions you are free to explore the Abbey you use as a base of operations and the pocket dimension in which it resides, talk to other characters, research new items and abilities, craft potions and equipment, collect reagents ala Dragon Age, solve various of the puzzles on the Abbey grounds and find various items that fill out the backstory like pages from Wanda's journal. Some of the areas of the pocket dimension only open up according to certain story events so you're deliberately paced on this side of things. Nonetheless it's pretty big with around ten modestly sized zones in total.

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During this time you can also expand the capabilities of the abbey, adding training grounds, surveillance stations, bunch of other stuff that give you additional abilities on missions or help level up characters more quickly or provide narrative side-missions. Some of these are major nice to haves.

2. Friendships, Marvel characters and relationships.

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Combat missions are the really extraordinary part of this game but it's also the most complex area so I want to quickly discuss the relationship side of the game first as it's actually pretty good fun. So first off, if you're a Marvel fan you're really going to like this. All of the characters are very well written (including ones you're not necessarily meant to like). The MCU looms over this game in one sense which is that the voice actors mostly copy the style of their movie counterparts where present. Iron Man sounds so like Robert Downey Jr. I had to double check it wasn't actually him. But in terms of characterisation they are much closer to the comics. Tony is an overbearing ass, Banner is, well, Banner is not great to be around. Conversely Captain Marvel is a Hell of a lot more likeable to than the Brie Larson version. Dr. Strange is pompous but fun. Your character is half-demon so Dr. Strange tends to pick up on that. I recall walking into the Forge where he was working and got a "What foul presence dares sully these... oh, Hunter - it's you." I kind of got to like the way he tries to be subtle when working out if I might go bad.

There are various micro-plots going on around you the whole time. Like does Blade fancy Captain Marvel? You can attend the Avenger's book club. More fun than it sounds. Help Robbie and Peter Parker working in the machine shop. Solve the backstory of your origins with Agatha (ghost of your dead step-aunt witch, very annoying) and so on.

When heroes have a good relationship with you, you and they get bonuses, including special combo cards which aren't game changers but are pretty nice to have. They also open up to you more and have conversations. You can enhance that with appropriate gifts or activities, but the game leaves you to deduce from dialogue what is most appropriate for who. I mean it's pretty obvious that Wolverine is going to like to drink so you choose the bar for him, but you have to listen carefully to conversations to work out which Avenger secretly enjoys painting. Frankly, if you do what I did and up the difficulty to every time the cap is lifted, you're going to actually need these friendship bonuses. If you can get team friendship up, then heroes will also start to get bonus combos amongst themselves as well. Sometimes you can't please everybody all of the time. Carol Danvers and Blade asking me to settle which is worse - a Skrull or a Vampire - is on the milder end.

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Unusually for this sort of thing, the jokes actually land. Except Captain America's "Dad jokes" and I honestly don't think they're meant to. And better, the humour is very character based. Like your character has missed the last few centuries and doesn't know everybody, either. So when he/she asks "Why is everyone so worried about upsetting Banner?" it's a nice little touch. Game is filled with character moments. I'll even forgive Nico (who is annoying as Hell) asking Venom what his pronouns are. It's about the first time in history that question actually makes sense.

Okay, that's enough sperging on the relationship side of things. Lets get to the meat (as Venom would say) of things:

3. Combat

Wow. Where to start? So a mission starts with you picking your squad. Normally three characters. Normally free choice from any characters in your roster you haven't sent off on Covert Ops. You can select some special equipment items to take with you as well if you have them. Some missions are more general ones you can take by choice. Some are story missions that you have to take to progress, though you can choose when. Story missions are how you get some of the new additions to your roster.

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You then begin in some sort of arena for the battle to take place, whether that be a rooftop, a sewer, a street, a desert valley or anywhere else.
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Your characters and opponents are set down automatically and then you get a random draw of cards. By random, I mean random initially. There's a seed to the randomness which means if you fail the mission and restart, you get the same hand of cards. Redraws etc. would all be the same so long as you play the same sequence. For the final battle, which I did on Ultimate 2 difficulty, I had a literal side of A4 with handwritten notes on it for the sequence I had worked out trying to get to the end of it. And then I ended up redoing it in notepad so that I could change things around and try a couple of different branches at different points in my efforts to solve the battle. And solving is the right term for the harder battles. Like a multi-dimensional Sudoku puzzle. I honestly thought multiple points in the final battle that I literally couldn't beat it. But I went back over and over and figured out ways to keep certain characters alive and invent new strategies to beat certain enemies and was finally able to do it. Major sense of accomplishment, honestly.


Lets try and give an example. Ghost Rider is a character I struggled with right up into the final battle and I typically avoided using him on any mission I thought would be hard. He's something of a glass cannon (as opposed to the Scarlet Witch who is a glass... something. Seriously, her Legendary power literally incapacitates her). He doesn't have a great deal of abilities that grant him block so he takes damage easily. Even a couple of his own powers damage him! But he also has some powers that steal life and he ALSO has a pretty effective card that increases in power every time he takes damage. So if you can get that card in his hand early on, you just hold onto it and avoid dying. There's no cap on it at all so eventually, IF you can keep walking the tightrope between life and death with him, you can eventually unleash this nuclear weapon of destruction on a boss character to great effect. I've been able to one-shot a named boss character this way but it takes a lot of careful card plays to pull it off. In contrast, Captain America is a stalwart who is built around survivability. Quite a few of his cards grant Block to himself or others and some of the grant Taunt. In short, success starts even before the mission begins by picking characters that are planned out to work well together. Pair Ghost Rider with Cap and you're now freer to pick a character for the third slot according to the mission. For example, Wolverine is great at clearing the board of minions having a lot of chain abilities. Blade has a lot of chain abilities too but Wolverine's secondary focus is survivability. He just keeps healing and can even get up after being incapacitated (that's a big deal on the higher difficulties where you don't get free revives); whilst Blade's secondary focus is more focused big damage and bleed effects. Meanwhile you have Dr. Strange who is frankly pretty weak at damage AND at survivability. But a Hell of a support character and Heroism generator.

Right - Heroism. So on the bottom right of the screen there's a dial that shows your current Heroism level. Some cards are heroic and they cost X amount of Heroism to play in addition to the regular card play cost. Non-heroic cards usually generate heroism. So it builds and then you can spend it to activate what is usually a superior card. But you can also spend it on environmental attacks, such as blowing up fuel tanks, triggering leylines, vaulting off boulders into an enemy (always a fun one) and so forth. There's an absolute tonne of modifiers to cards as well. You can generate modifiers for the cards in your deck back at the Abbey. They cost resources and are randomly generated. So when you get a good combo, it's precious. A modifier might be as simple as gives +1 Move when you play it to Quick which means if you KO an enemy when you play it, you get it as a free card play.

Lets say I have Dr. Strange, Hunter and Ghost Rider. The mission is to capture a Hydra agent. I hate these missions - very tricky.

Each of the characters has a deck of eight cards which I've built and refined during the course of this game. So when the mission starts that's 24 cards in my deck of which I get a random assortment. The size of your hand can be modified by various circumstances based on things I've done or built at the Abbey. Lets say I get a hand of six cards. For all I know I might get nothing but six Ghost Rider cards. But thankfully I don't. I've got three card plays and a bunch of enemies one of which is a hydra agent I have to catch. I get a bonus "Capture Agent" card thrown into my hand. But I can't play it yet because some fucker with a shield has taken up a bodyguard position on the agent. So priority would be to deal with the bodyguard and catch the agent. Reinforcements are going to keep coming in so long as that agent is still on the board. However, there's also a Hydra sniper. Snipers are fucking awful. They can both apply a vulnerability modifier to a hero AND their shots are devastating. So now I have TWO priority targets. Urgh! Well one of the cards in my hand is Winds of Whatoom which you can tell by the fancy name is one of Dr. Strange's. This card does knockback and has the Quick modifier meaning it's free if I can knock out an enemy in one go. So... I could use it to target a minion. Minions don't have hitpoints, they just need any damage effect to take them down. They still hit plenty hard though. So if I did this I'd have one less strike coming at me on the enemy's go and it wouldn't cost me a card play. Good for my survivability but it's not going to move me forward. That sniper though is standing near an electrical generator. If I use the Winds of Whatoom on the sniper I can knock him into it doing a bit of damage but more importantly it will Stun him for a turn. And like I said, he's very dangerous. In my deck for Hunter, I have Mind Bender. This temporarily turns an enemy against other enemies. If I can use that against the enemy with the shield the agent will lose her protection and I can play the Capture Agent card. But unfortunately I didn't draw it. I do have three redraws however. I see I have Bladestorm in my hand. That's great but it costs 4 Heroism to play which I don't have and it's also more of a mass enemy clearer than focused damage. I decide to redraw that and hope for Mindbender. I get Lash - a Quick knockback attack for Ghost Rider which does him damage. I want it, but I also want Ghost Rider's Hellfire card in my hand for it because that's the card I mentioned earlier which increases in damage every time Ghost Rider is hurt. So I look through the rest of my hand and see Hellmouth. That lets Ghost Rider open a fiery pit for two turns that enemies can be knocked into potentially insta-killing them. I don't want to give it up but I'm pinning my hopes on getting something more immediately useful. So I redraw it and get Merciless. That's a Hunter card and it does acceptable damage but a major bonus amount if the target is helpless (stunned or bound). This is good - I've a new option suddenly. I use the Winds of Watoom to knock the sniper into the electrical generator. He is now stunned. It costs me a play but I think this is worth it over taking down a free minion. I then use Merciless on the stunned sniper. Unfortunately this does remove the stun because it only lasts until damage is done or a new turn starts, but it's maybe worth it because I do a massive amount of damage and he's nearly dead. I'm two card plays down, I have a single redraw left and I haven't fully taken down a single enemy yet. I thought I was being clever but I may have just played myself. I decide that a copy of Sepharim's Shield can go - it's one of Dr. Strange's protective cards and it costs a lot of heroism so it's out of my reach for now. I redraw it and hooray! I get Ghost Rider's Hellfire ability. So I now use Ghost Rider's Lash card to take one minion and slam it into another minion, eliminating both of them in one play and because the Lash card has Quick it doesn't deduct a play. I do see the damage on the Hellfire card in my hand rise by about 64 points due to the damage Ghost Rider took from his own Lash card. I do have Drain Souls in my hand - a Ghost Rider card with Life Steal and chain (2). I decide I want to keep Ghost Rider in the fight as a priority, so I play that card target 1 minion and the sniper, killing both and restoring Ghost Rider back to maximum health. I also have a point of Heroism left. I see there's a empty crate nearby a Hydra solder with a stun baton. I spend a point of Heroism to have Dr. Strange levitate the crate into the back of his head. It does some damage but he's not a minion so he's still got quite a full health bar. I'd probably have been better off saving the Heroism for a later round when I might want to play a Heroism card. This round I've taken down three minions and a very dangerous sniper. That would be good if my objective were simply to survive and kill enemies. Unfortunately my actual objective is to catch the agent and both he and his bodyguard are untouched. I've again let myself be tempted into focusing on other things. I click end turn. I take a lot less damage due to my aggressive board clearing, but the agent heads for the edge of the map and the dude with the shield uses it to charge Dr. Strange, dazing him temporarily before returning to his station guarding the agent. AND three more minion soldiers run in as reinforcement. The new round starts and now I have to take down a resilliant bodyguard with a shield in two card plays so that I still have a card play remaining to play Capture Agent. The new round gave me some automatic additional cards and I also now have two new redraws... if one of them is Mind Bender, I can definitely capture the agent. But... basing your plans on a lucky draw is a path to failure. But if I can draw Ghost Rider's penance stare and somehow get the four heroism it requires to activate it, then that would take down the bodyguard directly. So I draw and hope...

That was a fairly simple first turn of combat. All of it is very intuitive and easy to learn when you play. But it can be fiendishly complex in outcome when you start thinking through all the possible interactions and sequences of card play, choice of targets, use of the environment and more.

As heroes level up they increase in basic stats which help them do more damage, shrug off negative effects, gain block, increase the size of area effects and more. You also gain access to more powerful cards (there are common, rare, epic and legendary) and can also modify them.

Even at the end I was still discovering new tricks. For example, Magik has a card which lets someone vanish for a turn. Always seems of very limited use to me - a way to keep her alive a little longer, she's not one of the most resilient of characters. But when an enemy is targeting someone they stay targeting that person even if they can't attack for some reason. And then it clicked. Get a character who can taunt multiple opponents. Works particularly well against shadowhonuds who always target as a pack, and then when lots of them are taunted have Magik pull her vanishing trick and suddenly on the enemy's go, they all stand around in frustration trying to work out where you went instead of doing something useful. Brilliant in retrospect. There's a tonne of tricks like this for you to work out. And best of all, you need to - the game always keeps you on your toes.

4. Downsides.

Really, nothing spoiled this game for me. It's rich in characters, dialogue, tactical depth, storyline and writing. I like my main character adapting to life in the 21st Century and all the little comments during combat Hunter makes: "Blade told me to mention your mother. Apparently she is... promiscuous?" I wasn't super into the witches of Salem backstory and the character of Agatha - the ghost who leads you through that storyline - I found annoying. Nico too but I think she's meant to be. Little Emo brat. But about the only real flaw is one that may not even apply which is that if you do a new play through from scratch, you'd probably have to go through a lot of the story exploration part again to be fully effective. Even that isn't a critical flaw though as with a bit more mission grind it shouldn't be a big problem.

I suppose one might say that the game is TOO big. There's an absolutely crazy amount of dialogue available between all the characters. But you can cut down on the exploring and do fewer side missions if you want. So really that's a bit of a mean thing to complain about.

Anyway, I hope this has been of interest. I would like to replay it if it lets me start on Ultimate difficulty the second time around. I might wait and get all the DLC as whilst the Venom one was fine on its own apparently their unique storylines all tie into each other somehow. So when Storm comes out if I have the time. But I'm not kidding - the game is more than complete without DLC.

Also, I think you were right about the marketing. In the course of writing this I searched online for screenshots of gameplay or any good example YouTube battles and it was a desert. Tragic waste. This is a really good game for people who like tactics and puzzle solving and for anyone who is a Marvel fan (esp. comics rather than MCU) this is written by people who are clearly very well read on them. The amount of Easter Eggs is crazy in this game.

If you have any questions, fire away. I'll be happy to answer.

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ok you fucker, I'm buying it. I judt got Vampire survivors and 5 hours vanished...how is this shitty looking game so addictive?
 
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I got a complete Rock Band Special Edition (Wii version) for 75 dollars the other day. Its huge, the box is in poor condition and I don't even like Rock Band but fuck it, that thing is worth hundreds, according to price charting.
 
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https://www.pcgamer.com/no-alice-se...bx9NwVhKtN4E-qcj8PhKnYiTktvJh4C1GlLWuQ3kVrs7M

For any of the three people that still hold any hope for a third Alice game, EA just killed that, what a shame. To be fair i thought it was odd that there had been 11 years with no update or anything but I guess tht's to be expected. RIP the Alice series, you were fun while you lasted.
On the question of licensing, they replied that "Alice" is an important part of EA’s overall game catalog, and selling or licensing it isn’t something they’re prepared to do right now,"

Cunts. Just sitting on it and giving a bullshit answer.
 
I don't know if anyone else plays Idle Wizard, but after stopping for a while it's still pretty fun. The dust system still sucks but e200+ Voidmancer's been carrying me to e280. The expeditions are interesting even if they aren't my favorite, I just wish summons weren't so bad. If anyone has played this game, a build for pushing to e300 would be welcome.
 
Would love to!
So I've given it a try, and I have two main big problems with it

Cutscenes
I'm spending more time watching the game than playing it. I just finished the 'capture the artifact' mission and tbh I don't know wtf is going on because I must have skipped 20 cutscenes as I got bored of watching.

Performance
I can run just about anything at max setting, but this game is stuttery as hell and the loading times are not short.

Otherwise the core mechanics and setting seem sound.

Edit: Ok the stuttering is down to Denuvo. Refunded.
 
So I've given it a try, and I have two main big problems with it

Cutscenes
I'm spending more time watching the game than playing it. I just finished the 'capture the artifact' mission and tbh I don't know wtf is going on because I must have skipped 20 cutscenes as I got bored of watching.

Performance
I can run just about anything at max setting, but this game is stuttery as hell and the loading times are not short.

Otherwise the core mechanics and setting seem sound.

Edit: Ok the stuttering is down to Denuvo. Refunded.
Well that's a shame but not everyone likes the same things. Hopefully you don't feel you wasted too much time. I had occasional crashes but not stuttering. I played on near max settings at a pretty high resolution. I guess there are a fair few cut scenes. I enjoyed the story.

At least you got your money back. I'm still going to recommend it personally as I found the gameplay and role-play elements a lot of fun for me.
 
Well that's a shame but not everyone likes the same things. Hopefully you don't feel you wasted too much time. I had occasional crashes but not stuttering. I played on near max settings at a pretty high resolution. I guess there are a fair few cut scenes. I enjoyed the story.

At least you got your money back. I'm still going to recommend it personally as I found the gameplay and role-play elements a lot of fun for me.
Oh the core mechanics were sound, and I was ok playing without paying much attention to the movie sections, but the Denuvo related stuttering was unacceptable to me. I'm really surprised Denuvo still gets used considering the brand is poison.
 
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I'm really surprised Denuvo still gets used considering the brand is poison.
Considering the price for a contract, there's probably a sizable number of bean counters crunching numbers claiming that X total sales are lost to piracy, and only Y number of customers will have any issue with performance, so it comes out as a net gain to buy the license. The suits at big publishers like 2K are probably all for it, anything to stop "theft." A lot of studios seem to drop it after a year anyway (since most sales are just in the first month or so, besides), but some seem to keep it in perpetuity (like WB), which makes me wonder if they get some grandfathered in deals at a lower rate or they're really just that worried that someone's going to torrent Mad Max 8 years later.
 
Well that's a shame but not everyone likes the same things. Hopefully you don't feel you wasted too much time. I had occasional crashes but not stuttering. I played on near max settings at a pretty high resolution. I guess there are a fair few cut scenes. I enjoyed the story.

At least you got your money back. I'm still going to recommend it personally as I found the gameplay and role-play elements a lot of fun for me.
You have also made me interested in the game, my impression was that it was just Xcom with Marvel and that sounded boring. Did you ever play Chimera Squad btw?
 
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