Musician T-Pain talks Crusader Kings 3 in what might be the most bizarre video game adverts since Sony’s promotion of the original PlayStation. The two videos are promotional material for Crusader Kings 3’s addition to Xbox Game Pass. 

In the first trailer, titled “A New Religion”, the award-winning artist announces that he’s starting his own religion in the game. Modestly describing himself as “a freaking paragon of virtue” and “a medieval genius”, he sets out to create a whole new faith.

Christening this new religion, “Bootyism”, T-Pain excitedly proclaims that it’s going to be a “liberal and forward-thinking religion, a church for the people that’s going to benefit everybody”. But as the video below shows, not everyone is happy with T-Pain’s new doctrine.

And the weirdness doesn’t stop there. In the second advert (opens in new tab), the musician guides us through the creation of his “Holy Booty Empire”, where he starts out with ideals of rewriting history by being a fair and just ruler, providing education for everyone and keeping taxes low. But it’s not long before there’s an assignation attempt on emperor T-Pain thwarting his attempts to reign peacefully. Things go from bad to worse as he demonstrates what can happen when diplomacy goes very wrong.

Crusader Kings 3’s PS5 and Xbox Series X release date is set for March 29, and it’s launching with a controller-friendly interface for consoles.

If you’re a fan of turn-based tactics or love a good RTS, read our pick of the best strategy games you can play right now.

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Still, Marvel XCOM isn’t a bad starting point for understanding what Marvel’s Midnight Suns is. The creative director describes it as a tactical RPG, taking characters from across the Marvel universe – the trailer reveals Wolverine, Iron Man, Captains Marvel and America, and Dr. Strange, alongside cult favorites such as Magik, Ghost Rider, and Blade – to try and stop the demonic threat of Lillith. She’s a villain from ‘Rise of the Midnight Sons’, one of Solomon’s favourite comic book arcs from the ‘90s. While the untapped well of inspiration and unusual roster of Marvel heroes are all intriguing, the biggest surprise is that you’ll be taking direct control of a brand new character created entirely for the game. 

Join The Hunt

The Hunter, the figure who is raised from a sarcophagus at the start of the trailer, is leading this merry gang of demon hunters and, according to Solomon, she’s been designed with Marvel to be the first customizable character in their history. “They look however the player wants them to look, and they will appear however the player wants them to appear, and they will also play in combat however the player wants them to play in combat.”

It marks a big departure from how games have approached bringing Marvel characters to players recently. Insomniac’s Spider-Man series worked because it made you feel like Spidey, the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy is aiming to recreate the hilarious bickering tension that made them breakout stars in the MCU, and Marvel’s Avengers tried to recreate the film’s mix of grandeur and family drama within a Destiny-style template. The link between these games is that they’re all trying to let you play hero, whereas Midnight Suns wants you to create one. 

You’ll shape The Hunter through combat and costumes, and build out her personality between missions at The Abbey, a supernatural hideout that houses your squad during downtime. “The key to The Abbey is that this is where you form your relationships with the other heroes and relationships are just as important as combat in our game,” says Solomon.

The Abbey Road

The Abbey might seem like an easy comparison to XCOM 2’s Avenger – the place where you could focus on your squad and upgrades between missions – but it’s a substantially different type of experience in how Solomon explains it to us. For starters, you’ll explore it with a third-person camera, roaming around in real-time and getting to explore the home away from home for these heroes. More importantly, it’ll give you a chance to bond with the heroes that you’ll spend so much of your time fighting alongside. 

“I think the equally powerful fantasy for fans of Marvel is not just fighting, it’s actually how the heroes live with each other,” he says. “We have a large roster of heroes, 12 Marvel heroes in addition to The Hunter, and you have to choose between these heroes in terms of who you’re going to focus on developing relationships with.” 

“And that means [picking] your dialogue choices when you’re talking with them, which happens all the time. You can solicit all these heroes to hang out with you after combat and you have to choose which one you’re hanging out with and what the hangout is. Blade may want to lift weights or meditate, whereas Dr. Strange may want to read a book by the fire, while Tony Stark may want to drink at the bar or play video games. So it’s a very social environment.”

Taking part in these activities will help you bond with characters, unlocking their full potential on the battlefield. And while we don’t yet know if there’ll be a limit on how much time you can spend chatting with each character, it seems to offer a unique way of bringing the characters you want to get to know to the fore. By focusing on the characters away from the action, it gives us hope that Midnight Suns will capture the moments that give Marvel its humanity, such as The Avengers blowing off steam by getting Shawarma.

Perfectly balanced 

While we’ve touched on the Marvel side of the equation, this is as equally exciting as what developer Firaxis is bringing to the table. Solomon reveals to us that it was Marvel who approached the XCOM studio, and as a huge Marvel fan, he was immediately interested in collaborating – so long as he could find the right story to tell.  

“We went back to my favorite comic from Marvel history, which is an early 1990s comic book event called the Rise of The Midnight Sons. And this is, for most people, a very deep cut. There was this all-powerful villain, and her name is Lilith – the mother of demons. She comes to Earth and the only way to stop her was to unite all the supernatural heroes of the Marvel Universe in this super awesome comic book event. And so I love this comic and it was something that was untouched, and I think untapped. And even just the supernatural side of Marvel remains untapped. I don’t think for very long, but for now it’s untapped.”

With the setting and characters in place, it then posed Firaxis a question of how they would bring their signature strategy style to this universe. When I ask Solomon about the potential of permadeath – a key element of the risk and reward in XCOM – he opens up on the new design philosophy that is driving Marvel’s Midnight Suns. “When we started developing, I realized just how different this game was mechanically. [Because] superheroes are a very different thing than soldiers, right? With soldiers, they’re taking cover and being afraid of the aliens, as opposed to if you want to properly be a superhero, you’re not taking cover, you’re not afraid, and you’re fighting,” he explains. “I think that’s thematic, that’s not mechanics, but like the thematics drive the mechanics where they’re very, very different, so we actually don’t have permadeath but it’s more than that.” 

While permadeath may be gone, the core experience is still a turn-based one on the battlefield, with smaller tweaks – such as the removal of grids from combat as well – helping to build a different, faster style of strategy. Solomon is keen to stress that the team is looking to create the same levels of complexity that XCOM is beloved for, but now the choices you make are different. “You still have the same number of decisions, but there are a lot of different ways to achieve what you want. And it’s more a case of ‘How many bad guys? Can I take them out with this one ability’, as opposed to ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna die’”.

Wait your turn

While XCOM’s appeal arose from the suffocating tension of knowing one wrong move could be your last, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is forgoing that without forgetting what makes strategy so much fun in the first place. While a gameplay showcase is set for September 1, Solomon gives us a sense of what Midnight Suns wants to achieve from the game’s combat. “I guess the analogy we use as designers is carrot and stick, right? This game is much more carrot, in terms of how well did you succeed, not if you make a mistake – you know, ‘whoops, you’re gonna get hit with a stick.” In that sense, Midnight Suns is about taking the complex choices from XCOM and asking you to approach them in different ways. It’s turning up the pace and challenging you in a way that doesn’t have you instinctively heading to the load menu every time you make a mistake. 

The sense is that Midnight Suns is about to be ahead of the curve for both Marvel stories and strategy games. As the MCU starts to flirt with the idea of more supernatural characters – Wandavision felt like dipping a toe rather than taking the plunge – and few strategy games have nailed the pace that Solomon describes, it feels like this is the chance for a larger audience to discover the joys of both. When I ask Solomon about adapting the game for new players, he says: “If you enjoy XCOM, then you would understand that form and complex choices are, I think, what makes those games fun. And we wouldn’t give that up, you know, for some sort of mythical wider audience. But I do think that this game is more accepting, simply because we thought of a new way to kind of present it to players.” With this venture into the darker side of Marvel, we can’t think of many other studios who we’d rather have posing us those sort of challenges on and off the battlefield.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is set to launch in March 2022 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. 

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Wildermyth is a game about stories. Set within the pages of an unfinished tome of epic tales, the final chapters are yours to complete via a collection of would-be heroes, all of whom want to do something worthy of immortalizing. When an army of monsters finds its way into your village, or sentient machines begin staking a claim to the land, every character seems to acknowledge that a call to adventure of this kind of magnitude doesn’t come along very often. From those humblest of beginnings stems a perfect format, as your band of adventurers sets out knowing exactly what’s required of them to make those stories come to life.

But within the major narratives – those you might expect to hear a bard sing of in some ancient tavern – are dozens of other stories. Away from the fight, your characters have their own lives to lead. They grow old, fall in love, mourn old friends, lose beloved keepsakes, or just tell each other stories; each time Wildermyth turns a page, there’s another outpouring of personality from both its surprisingly naturalistic dialogue and its charming character art. As you play, you might think that some of those stories belong to you – those of your perfectly crafted strategic approach or desperate, last-ditch critical strikes that save your entire campaign – but your characters lay claim to those moments as well, dramatizing their most daring escapades to win over new recruits. 

When it comes to those grand deeds, the storybook elements do take a back seat, as conflict is resolved through relatively traditional turn-based combat, a playful papercraft art style never letting you forget the importance of narrative. The three classes available at the beginning of each campaign mean early battles are a simple affair; nimble hunters fire arrows at distant foes, while beefier warriors mop up damage in close combat. Most interesting is the magic-wielding mystic class, whose power resides in the ability to ‘interfuse’ with objects in the world. Fuse with a tree, for instance, and you can cause it to explode, showering an area in splintering shards of wood. That same tree, however, can also conjure roots and vines to grab an enemy and pin them in place. Over time, a mystic might learn more about specific elements, specializing in destructive fire magic or learning to wield stone or metal with deadly force.

Those branching combative possibilities might initially be most apparent in Wildermyth’s magic users, but as a campaign progresses, every character will get their own chance to shine. For some, the process is gradual, with new abilities learned with each new level. For others, it’s more drastic. As your party travels the world, they might stumble upon forgotten altars or solitary forest guardians. In one campaign, my hunter gained an explosive fire attack that works fantastically with my mystics, but in another, one of my warriors announced they’d eventually be leaving my party to become one with nature or something similarly wholesome. Narratively, it was a perfectly delivered, heart-in-mouth moment – as a towering, faceless, lord of the forest crouched over one of my party’s most important members, I was terrified that I was about to see him crushed to death by a power beyond any of our understandings.

These events can provide a serious boon when it comes to etching your name in the annals of eternity, but they’re also what truly shapes Wildermyth’s most successful role-playing elements. In my experience of tabletop games, it’s rarely the climactic fight with the big bad that shapes a player’s idea of their character. Instead, it’s any number of tiny interactions spread throughout a campaign that might last years, both in fiction and in real life. Wildermyth captures all of those – from the most throwaway remarks to the most reality-bending alteration of the self – just as effectively as any great tabletop-inspired CRPG, creating a party of characters that feel like they belong to you, but that change and grow organically, somehow seeming to own their own stories even while you play out the game on their behalf. It’s a truly special bit of design and one that puts my own Dungeon Mastering skills to shame.

Wildermyth is out now on PC. Looking for some more hidden gems? Check out our list of new indie games 2021.

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Sadly, this winds up making for a tactically shallow and boring game. You’ll be dragged from one absurd situation to another for the sake of plot, customizing very little about the units in your makeshift army in between skirmishes. Individually, each unit is barely distinguishable to each other as well. All of them have basic attacks, and skills learned from gaining levels are all mostly the same moves dressed up with different names from one character to the next. For the vast majority of battles, these aren’t even necessary as fights can be won by avoiding skill use altogether once you learn to put up with the vapid enemy AI. It’s a series of character beat downs with short breaks in between to set up the next scenario.

Clearly, the main draw here is that there are a lot of cartoony goofballs from the franchises curated by Sega, Capcom, and Namco Bandai together in one package. On this base level alone, Project X Zone does a fine job. Each character has its own voice that matches up with his or her personality from the games that spawned them, and for as insipid as the story is, there’s some charm to a few of the conversations. Occasionally, you’ll even be hit with some clever inside-baseball jokes that poke fun at the video game business.

The real showcase is how these characters look and move when they’re together, but this turns out to be a bit uneven as well. Attack animations are lovingly crafted and pull straight from individual games the characters come from. That will give you a nerd chuckle by itself, but the rest of the game is drab and ugly. Environments are sparse and lack detail, and field animations for the characters are stiff. While you could give points for including enemies from various franchises to pad out the bad guy list (think the Red Arremer as a legion of recurring foes), they aren’t particularly varied past a few color palette swaps.

The actual combat should be given some credit, though. One unit on the map is comprised of a pair of characters that attack in unison and different combinations of buttons execute combos. Time these attacks correctly and your team will rack up serious damage, and even more so when you call in an attached support character or use the aid of adjacent units for combination attacks. The novelty wears off fast, though. While you’re given a nice list of different attacks to use, soon enough you’ll find the one or two that consistently work and rely on them for most of the game. Couple that with the aforementioned sameness of the cast and you’ve got the recipe for a boring-battle cocktail.

The worst part of it all is that you’re dragged by the ear through the plot whether you want to or not. There’s no opportunity to deviate from it for distractions like power leveling or farming materials from repeatable encounters and, depending on the situation, you never know who is going to wind up in your party from one fight to the next, and that’s a drag. Better strategy RPGs like February’s Fire Emblem: Awakening (opens in new tab) nearly overwhelmed you with options for customizing not only your troops but the way they behaved. Here, you’re simply going from point A to B, and that can rob your characters of meaningful growth and, by extension, rob you of any tactical complexity. It’s a boring death march toward the cliff of bad anime taste.

The crowd that always wanted to see Ryu deliver a dragon punch sandwich to T-elos has made their decision before reading this review, because this game is for them. Franchise devotees that don’t mind an inconsequential story to get a bunch of disparate characters together will appreciate how lovingly many of them are treated. But that’s about as deep as this puddle gets. With the wealth of RPGs, and even great SRPGs, that have arrived on the 3DS in the last several months, it would almost be unconscionable not to recommend one of those games instead of Project X Zone. Fun combat and screaming Tekken characters can only take you so far.

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