Midnight Fight Express Review

Midnight Fight Express is the most retro feeling, modern looking game I have encountered in quite some time. The plot, which has you playing as an amnesiac ex-gang member and one many army, could have been lifted from any 90’s film or game with cheesy pop culture references splashed throughout the rather lengthy dialogue. However, it also complete nails that 90’s beat ’em up feeling and during an early level in which a train arrives and goons pour out, I realised exactly what it reminded me of: Renegade 2 on the ZX Spectrum. That’s a very good thing.

A framing device, in which our handcuffed protagonist is interviewed by some shady Agents, is used to set up the game, throwing you onto the streets of a city where crime has run amok and you are the man to set things right. You are joined by Droney, a talking drone who does an awful lot of exposition, guides you to your next fight, and occasionally blows a door up to help out. The majority of levels have you fighting through a location of some sort, be it a back alley, a kitchen, or a police station filled with stripper bunnies, but there’s also some diversions to keep things interesting. It could be a jetski race or a battle where a maniac with a crane keeps on trying to squash you by dropping a massive crate on your head.

For the most part you will be using your fists and it’s here where the game shines. Each punch or kick has an feeling of weight with enemies reacting as if they have just been smacked very hard in the chops, and the same is true with guns. Although the game is not a shooter, you can pick up all sorts of firing weapons and use them for a limited time before throwing the empty gun at an enemy’s head and knocking them out. The physicality extends to special moves which can be unlocked from a large skill tree and you will soon be parrying, back flipping and smashing heads in to tables, chaining punches, kicks and special moves together in lengthy score-busting combos. If this all sounds familiar then you’d be right; the Batman Arkham trilogy are clearly a big influence on the game, but Midnight Fight Express takes it to the next level with a heft to each punch that even the Dark Knight couldn’t manage.

There are a hundred items that can be used as weapons, from knives to a very silly pillow fight at a game developers office, and you can also pick up many of the items in the level and throw them, The enemies themselves are you standard beat ’em fare of grunts, brutes, and ninjas, but almost every level brings a reskin of an enemy type to keep things feeling fresh. As the game progresses they get more fantastical with toxic enemies spewing vomit green vomit and our anti-hero gets a Wonder Woman style lasso, and of course there are boss battles, some with multiple stages.

In keeping with the 90’s arcade feel each of Midnight Fight Express’ 45 level lasts just five minutes or so before you get ranked upon completion. Each level has a high score leaderboard, a few secrets, and unlocks so there are plenty of reasons to go back and replay the game and reach that elusive S-ranking. When the going gets tough and you die, the game restart almost instantly from a very welcome mid-level check point, keeping that important “one more go” arcade addiction fever.

The game does a great job of making you feel like a heavyweight action hero, so it’s a shame the plot, written by the writer of Destiny 2, gets in the way. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s very much in keeping with arcade vibe, but there’s a lot of it and the flow of the action is often broken by Droney stopping things dead and explaining what is going on. Midnight Fight Express could have benefited from copying, rather ironically, Destiny 2 by having a corridor section free of goons and voice acting explaining the plot rather than freezing the screen and making you hammer the circle button to read all the text.

The game has been created by just three people – a writer, a motion capture artist and a developer – and is incredibly impressive for such a small team. I hope it’s a success because with a bigger budget and some voice acting thrown in a sequel could well be challenging the biggest fighting franchises around.