Brawlers haven’t been as moving and shaky as other types of games in recent years. Instead of moving things forward, they seem to mostly be stuck at the stage before trying to rebuild and improve.
Boxing, kicking and fighting are easy to enjoy in most games – but few really feel like they are in our modern age, and few want you to be the star of an action movie Midnight Fight Express.
I’ve been following Midnight Fighter Express long before it had an official title. Back at the beginning, indie developer Jacob Dzwinel would share short GIFs of cool stunts and knockdowns, and everyone would lose their minds. I’m still skeptical.Many games look sharp in care fully edited trailers, and anyone is good enough at the game’s combat can produce gold
It didn’t all click until I got it. That’s really what it’s all about.
Midnight Fight Express is essentially a classic arcade fighting game, but it simply could not have existed in the classic era. It’s also a game that incorporates the advancements the media has made since into its core design, creating a rare mix of old-school cool and modern jewelry.
Before you make laws with your fists, you’ll first notice how short the game’s levels are. They last anywhere from 3 to 11 or 15 minutes and are designed to replay perfectly. Your first experience is more like a trial run; a rehearsal where your purpose is to explore the problems you face and develop strategies.
The game recognizes this and has you worrying about most challenges and secrets until the next dozen or so times you’ll be retrying the same level. Once you complete a level, your performance is assessed, and the game happily lists all the things you missed (and cool moves you weren’t smart enough to come up with at the time). It pushes you to start over and do better even before you have time to think about your next steps. Your score, time and leaderboard rank are all tracked – recorded, waiting for you to do better.
Within the level itself, you can start over with the push of a button, so if you screw up, or lose your only chance to take down that enemy in the specific way the challenge requires, you can go right back to it.
Midnight Fight Express has 40 levels that are roughly the same length. You can easily go through them without too much friction. You can choose a set difficulty level, or customize it to your specific needs. You can control enemy aggression, your own initial health (and regeneration), HUD attack metrics, and even whether you respawn or restart the level at the last checkpoint after death.
It took me a while to realize that the point was not to finish the game – it was to finish the game in style. Even on the more challenging difficulties (I’m playing Hard), I can brute force the level. It only becomes a challenge when bosses and certain types of enemies join in. The rest of the time, you have ample opportunity to accomplish some cool things in the moment. Higher difficulties have only real upward pressure.
After completing a level, you will unlock a skill point and some cash. Skill points can be spent living on any of six different trees.
The whole thing is easy to understand, and you’ll unlock them all at the end of the game; you won’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get what you need. The first time you complete a level, you’re always guaranteed to get skill points, and you can easily assign or act from the same place. It’s intuitive enough, though it might disappoint those looking for something deeper.
The goal is obviously for you to create a cool version of the tough guy. For me, it’s more dependent on the Terminator, for others who might be caught and disarmed. All this is achievable.
However, level design can sometimes get in the way of making you feel cool. Fighting in corners is often tricky. The game doesn’t remove occluded walls, so you’ll guess by reading enemy silhouettes and your own.
However, any cash you earn can be used to influence your tough guy image: it’s entirely spent on makeup. Things like gloves, hats, boots, shirts and pants. There are plenty to choose from in each category, and the cooler ones are locked behind certain challenges. You can also dress up as some of the enemies you encounter, which can be fun/disorienting.
In fact, I’ve found that customization has a slight effect on gameplay as well. Later in the game, the number of enemies throwing themselves (and other objects) at you can be a bit high.Having a color scheme that is clearly and quickly recognizable in the clutter allows me to react only faster.
One of my favorite things to discover in Midnight Fight Express was seeing which new sandbox the game would throw me into next. There is definitely an element of style and aesthetic behind these choices. Who among us has not imagined ourselves doing justice in crowded bars, construction sites, shantytown rooftops, moving trains or public toilets.
You’ll often be surprised by what clever new tricks come next. For example, one floor occurs in an underground subway tunnel with running trains.You need to watch out for them, but you can also time it only Power to put most attackers in their path for a good and satisfying multi-kill.
Between the standard brawler levels is the weakest product in the game. Chasing missions are often welcome, even if it’s fun to see the scenarios the game sets for you. You usually have limited control, usually shoot from a moving boat/motorcycle etc, and usually don’t have enough room to maneuver. Some of these levels brought me to the verge of lowering the difficulty to pass them. It’s a good testimony, but not so much part.
Regular brawler levels are full of things to throw at criminals and use them as weapons against them. They won’t hesitate to do the same to you, especially cardboard boxes. Melee weapons usually have limited durability, so you can’t rely on them very often.
You can use almost all the same tools your enemies use. If you feel at a disadvantage, you can always go to disarm, or overwhelm the bearer so much that they have to drop it. Even the deadlier option – what actually makes certain enemies more threatening – can be picked up and used. For example, a hammer can make normal thugs more dangerous because it has a wider attack range and hits hard. If you don’t save that lunatic for last, you can prioritize them and use their weapons against others.
If there’s one tool I feel the game can’t live without, it’s the gun. The difficulty is that whenever they are introduced, the balance gets out of hand. You might decide to take out the gun-carrying goon first, at which point you’ll end up with a weapon that’s too good to use. Even if there are only a few bullets left, it is generally enough to easily kill two or three enemies.
Guns that you can equip as a secondary weapon have a long cooldown and can only fire one shot at a time. That could be the case, but the reality is that in almost every level in the mid to late game, you’re likely to encounter at least one person with a pistol, shotgun, or sniper rifle.
The last third of the game is particularly frustrating because of it, with more enemies with guns than none. I understand the need to keep escalating to keep up with your growing power, but I didn’t expect to dodge bullets and laser pointers to the same degree in brawler.
The action in Midnight Fight Express is very smooth. The game’s motion-captured motion, physics-based objects, and interactive environments all contribute to that feeling. However, the game isn’t consistent with destructible and unbreakable content, and guessing wrong could land you in trouble and ruin the moment. Depending on their height, you can dash over some objects, like a table, but it’s hard to tell from an overhead angle. This outage doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it feels like a wrench has been thrown into the machine.
I’d also like to see some longer moves that add more invincibility. There’s definitely a tactical element in forcing you to choose the right moment for the finish, but the game is usually more cool than witty, and it doesn’t feel good to be punched out by your carefully crafted moves.
However, the real spoiler is the dialogue.There isn’t any voice acting in the game, so you’ll want to read a lot of conversation.
There are these damn bubbles all over the place. I can put up with them in the interrogation room where most of the story is told, but when you’re eager to get your knuckles up against some mean cheekbones, the last thing you want is to read. Controlled by mysterious hackers, your companion drone usually has a lot to say and can be tiresome.
It doesn’t help that you have to press a button to move forward Every paragraph. I know it’s not cheap to hire professional actors, but it’s better to have a lot of banter and background chatter when you’re running around and fighting, rather than having everything stop completely.
Up until the moment it makes a weird left turn, the story is pretty predictable – another reason why I wanted to go through it and get into smacking. I don’t find it very engaging, aside from a few examples of references to comedy, callbacks to movie quotes/other games, and not-so-subtle political commentary.
Granted, that’s not a big deal, all things considered. If you’re curious about the protagonist’s backstory and his place in the bigger picture, you’ll encounter NPCs in many quests with a line or two about your past life. You are motivated to seek them out to improve your overall score and to get some context on these events.
Going back to Midnight Fight Express’s original reputation — all those GIFs — you can tell the developers wanted this element of the game to fit into the experience beyond its original Twitter marketing potential.
At the end of each level, the game picks the coolest seconds and lets you save them as GIFs. It’s definitely a good decision, but they’re lacking in quality and resolution. I wish there was a way to view other people’s GIFs in-game, but for now, it’s better to use the console or PC’s built-in instant capture instead.
Recommending Midnight Fight Express is easy. On the one hand, it will launch Game Pass on its August 23 release date. But even if Game Pass isn’t a factor, it’s still worth buying because of how cool it makes you feel and how dynamic it looks — and most importantly: how it makes both of those feel to most players.
Test version: PC. Code provided by the publisher. The game is also available on PS4 and Xbox One and launches in September.