Indie games have been partial to the trend popularized by Hotline Miami where brutal action unfolds to the beat of a thumping soundtrack. It was a high bar that not even Dennaton Games could clear with the sequel, but that hasn’t stopped other developers from creating their own brand of stylish, violent games. Midnight Fight Express is another entry into that genre and while its tunes kick ass, kicking ass in the game is a disappointing chore.
That doesn’t appear to be the case at first since Midnight Fight Express looks great in motion. As was heavily publicized, its combat animations were performed by Eric Jacobus, who is most known for his stunt work on 2018’s God of War. The game’s impressively large library of different beatdowns is smooth and savage enough to always provide a visual spectacle and sell the impact of each hit. Since there are so many different animations, they don’t repeat often enough to get old, especially if players are mixing up their attacks to get higher scores.
However, the animations mask its mechanical shortcomings. Beating up thugs can be satisfying early on when there’s not much going on, but the combat begins to buckle when it escalates in complexity.
Keeping up a combo is extremely frustrating since the protagonist is prone to whiffing punches even if the animation magnetizes him to the nearest goon. Other enemies will just continually backpedal (which leads to even more whiffs) and slow down the tempo. There is an attack that’s meant to zip to a faraway foe and remedy this, but it only sometimes works as advertised. Needing to repeatedly dodge is also a headache since it always repositions the player character and sets them up to shadowbox even more and once again work their way in. One move is supposed to let players attack out of a dodge and continue their combo, but it is too unwieldy to properly aim. With all of these complications, it’s almost impossible to regularly strike any sort of cadence.
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Flow is so important to a game like this since being able to bounce from target to target is a key part of the fantasy inherent to melee action games. Games like Sifu and the Batman: Arkham series are magnificent examples of this since they are mechanically sound and rhythmic enough to get players into that flow state. While it has a thoroughly entrancing electronic soundtrack, Midnight Fight Express lacks the finesse to get players into the zone; a fundamental misstep for a title in this genre.
But there are also a bunch of other questionable decisions that further impede the ability to fully enjoy its brawls. Strangely, there’s no way to restore health aside from turning on its gradual automatic healing. Regaining health passively like this is at total odds with a game like this that, for the most part, tries to push players to be more active. Not having any active alternatives to regenerate strength is a missed opportunity that would deepen the gameplay, especially if it had been tied to its execution system.
Even though it is mostly a melee game, players do get access to a special revolver, but it’s hamstrung through a series of bad decisions. It’s got a few different ammo types that yield more flexibility, but it, for some infinitely puzzling reason, automatically changes between those ammo types after one is fired. This means players have to constantly cycle through bullets each time they blast one in order to avoid losing track of what bullet is currently loaded, a process that is even more tedious since the cooldown for each resets when changing between them. And to make matters worse, the gun shares the same button as the finisher, meaning it’s all too easy to accidentally blow a round when trying to perform a fatality (that also has an inconsistent button prompt).
There’s a staggering amount of enemies to fail against, too. Some introduce a new threat to worry about like shields or immobilizing grabs, but so many of them are irritating and demonstrate why this much variety is detrimental. Certain grunts automatically counter attacks, but they’re not as clearly differentiated from the other normal henchmen they are nearly identical to. There are also robots that can only be harmed with electric attacks, a bafflingly narrow-minded move. Zombies, which show up for a single level, can even kill the player in one hit if they get too close, turning the game into a mediocre shooter that’s limited by its camera angle and cheap spawns.
Shooting is also the source of a lot of its issues since armed assailants are too prevalent for a game like this. It’s incredibly common for Midnight Fight Express to drop multiple gun-toting thugs in at the same time and kill the player before it’s even clear what has happened. Even when they are telegraphed, having to deal with so many ranged threats in a melee-focused experience like this is quite jarring and out of place.
Arming up and firing back is one solution but gunplay also has its share of unexplained oddities. Weapons (including the aforementioned revolver) are sometimes unresponsive since they won’t fire if an enemy is too close to the player, which happens a lot because it is still predominantly built around close-quarters fisticuffs. There are also a handful of shooting-only vehicle levels that have their share of unwieldy controls.
Midnight Fight Express needed more focus to realize its potential. Constantly throwing out different hazards and enemy types at a dizzying pace doesn’t work if the foundation is rocky, and confusing variety for quality is one of its structural problems. From rat-human hybrids to rocket launcher-wielding priests to a Fight Club champion named Kyler Turden, there is no shortage of bad guys to battle, but sadly the biggest fight players will have is against its controls.
SCORE: 5.5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 5.5 equates to “Mediocre.” The positives and negatives wind up negating each other, making it a wash.
