I’m not entirely sure. Some missions are clearly just more difficult with the enemies therein. But this was mentioned during a livestream and I want to say overall roster level has some bearing in that rating. Again, not sure. I think some missions may always be “hard”.
Pretty sure all the missions are dynamically adjusted to your level, and then jiggered appropriately to be easy, normal, or hard. I don’t think you can outlevel a hard mission, but I haven’t tried.
EDIT: Beaten by @Misguided’s lightning fingers! I even saw him typing and tried to get my post in first. :) If the difficulty tag is indeed a facet of team composition, that should be trivially easy to test. I’ll try to remember to check when I’m playing later.
Thanks for the answers!
Can you use Photomode to snap shots of the cinematics that accompany the big Heroic actions? Like Ghost Rider’s Hell Ride; when I try to use Photomode to capture a still from that, nothing happens. And yes, I’ve tried short and full long presses of the P key.
Aww, Hell Ride would make some cool comics covers! You’re locked out of the more traditional cinematics like hero combos, so I guess that applies to Hell Ride as well. :(
Welp, time to use a third-party capture app I guess!
Print screen works
I haven’t gone out of my way to use Iron Man, but it’s hard not to be impressed by his skill set. That hard mission that wrecked me yesterday? I went back in with Strange and Tony (subbing in for Peter) down one difficulty notch. Tony ended up unleashing a 6-chain surgical strike against a vulnerable/marked Venom to finish out the fight.
Strange still got wounded, but he’ll live.
Indeed. Clunky but it does work.
The game has a very cool way of offering you tactical choices and variety for sure. The different heroes definitely play differently, and choosing those eight cards is really important. I have been very impressed with the quality of the combat, something I was skeptical about initially due to my lack of familiarity with card-based systems and an unjustified as it turns out prejudice against them. This one is fun and effective, as well as pretty nuanced.
In several big, tough fights I’ve been able to set up just the right combo of moves, shoves, environmental hazards, items, and abilities to win at the last second so to speak. It’s very satisfying. And yeah Spidey is a bad ass, though I really do like all of them so far.
As someone that does really like card-based systems, this one will spoil you. There’s WAY more tactical depth here than your average deckbuilder because of the movement/positioning/environmental attacks. I love a good deckbuilder, but this marries that idea to a more tactical experience in a way that never been done…certainly not this well. It will be tough not to compare other card-based systems to this one.
Heh, so don’t get my hopes up for other deckbuilders, eh? Well, I’ll enjoy this one while I can!
I could be wrong. And like I said, I love a good deckbuilder. This is just so much more.
I found Forced Showdown had a similar effect on me, but in that case I felt that they took a twin stick ARPG feel and made a deck work well with it. Game was/is vastly underrated imo. bummed the devs moved on. I agree that this feels like a really well done integration of turn based tactical and deck.
I had thought that Binary would stay active as long as Capt Marvel had shields, but apparently not. I took her into the limbo portal (where she gained 2.5 levels!) and activated binary in turn 1. It dropped off in turn 3, even though she had over 100 shields. Bug, maybe?
I think some power need balancing.
I got the legendary blade storm power yesterday. It is a total disappointment.
It costs 4 heroic points to use and does knock back, which is nice, but…
I have a holy nova explosion power that costs 2 heroic points to use, that has a larger area (I think), does the exact same damage as blade storm, and heals all heroes in the AoE.
I also need to start doing story missions more. I just want to upgrade everything I can, but I know this will lead me to being in a place where the ONLY way to progress really is to do the main story missions if I keep doing side missions.
Also for heroes, I find both Iron Man and Dr. Strange to be the weakest heroes by far (maybe Magik because I never use her). Maybe I just have not gotten any good powers for them.
The heroes all have their own spheres of action, like DPS, support, tanking, that sort of thing, though they all have a degree of all-round utility it seems as well. Initially I looked just at the damage (or healing) being done, but now I’m seeing that there is a lot more to it than that. Knockback for instance is a hugely important tool for managing the battlefield. Any ability that moves your character is hugely important, especially when you start encountering situations where there are nasty AOE attacks being tossed around by the baddies. Abilities that chain are huge, too; you can apply all of the chains to one target for instance, so if it’s an ability that does 20 points of damage to three targets, you can dump 60 points on one instead. Stuff like that. And that doesn’t even get into the utility stuff like removing heroism costs, buffing card quality, adding cards to your hand, etc.
I do find it weird that Captain Marvel has a bunch of taunts, but it’s Hunter who specializes in block abilities. Carol isn’t particularly good at absorbing damage, so there’s a weird non-synergy there.
Magik’s “Gather” ability is a game changer if you pair it with good AoE attacks (like Captain Marvel’s Photon Beam).
Captain Marvel has several skills that provide block, including her “going binary” mechanic. And I think some other heroes can provide block? (I think Iron Man has one such skill, IIRC) Not sure though. I’m still early in the game.
I played this on Steam Deck and have some thoughts and warnings. First, here is a clip of the gameplay, which in combat I get a steady 40fps and it actually looks and feels great.
A quick off-camera video showing off the performance on the Steam Deck. All settings are set to MEDIUM and I have max refresh set to 40 and FPS set to cap at 40. In combat I get a fairly steady 40fps and it looks very smooth and nice (see video for example).
Walking around the Monestary I get less great performance, sometimes as low as 22-25 but mostly above 30. It can feel like it drags when it dips into the 20’s of course, but it’s just walking around exploring and talking to folks so it’s totally acceptable to me (and I could probably make it easier turning shadows down to LOW or something).
Two Caveats - it likes to crash on transition from sleeping or coming out of a battle. Usually it crashes after the auto save so not a huge problem, just annoying. However, manually save often as it does feel less stable than playing on PC (with the 2K Launcher bypass fix in place).
The other issue is Cloud Saves - my cloud saves sync just fine but are in the wrong folder. I have to go into the Steam Desktop and navigate to the folder to rename/copy it around so the Deck version can find the save files, then reverse that when I’m done to trigger a cloud sync so I can play on Desktop. If you are ONLY going to play on Deck, it’s not an issue, but something that I hope is addressed soon.