I might pick it up. Work has been busy AF tho so maybe I should wait until more discounts.
so far after 4+ hours my impressions are the performance is great, it looks good, animations in cutscenes aren't great, dialogue in insipid, there's way too much of the boring story, all the non-combat stuff should've spent more time in the oven. they could've saved a lot of time and effort by having just comic book style story segments, would've been cool and fresh too. none of this stuff is good. running around your base area and finding collectibles just isn't thrilling at all nor is talking to your team members. there's a lot of marvel comics lore though, which is nice i guess.
combat is 10 / 10, chef's kiss perfection. thankfully there's more of this than the other stuff. it uses a turn based card battler system. you bring in 3 heroes, in story missions you have to have the player character "The Hunter" who was created for this game, you kind of pick this character's powers too. on side missions you can bring whoever you want. each character has 8 cards, you can upgrade cards, get new cards, swap cards in and out of your deck, etc. each hero feels unique. there's a lot of repositioning moves and you can use environmental objects without using cards as long as you have heroism which is an energy system that is either built or used up by cards. lot of unique abilities, taunts and debuffs and buffs and whatnot, Nico for example has a "roulette" attribute on all her cards to signify her unpredictable magic from the books. in the books (and in the cutscenes) she can only cast a spell once but there's no similar gameplay mechanic for this. this roulette attribute means the card has randomly selected debuffs / damage values, etc. Magik can create portals and kick enemies into them which will reposition the enemy and potentially slam them into other enemies / environmental objects / etc.
you can only move one character per turn manually, but you can move them around at will until a card is played, after you move them once. you can move after all the cards that turn are played too, as long as you haven't moved yet. you can use this to set up positioning / environmental kills / etc. all the other moves are done automatically based on abilities. your character will reposition themselves to use an ability but you cannot (or at least i haven't figured out how yet) change this position. you just pick the enemy to use an ability on and your character automatically gets into range and does it. you can also swap cards out of your deck every turn with a discard which buffs iron man's abilities.
there's a lot of depth and different mission objectives and mechanics like some enemies have cards you get when you kill them that can give you huge buffs like reducing the heroism cost from environmental attacks for 2 turns. environmental attacks are like shoot explosive barrels, throw objects at enemies, vault over objects and do jumping attacks, knock light poles into enemies, etc.
