There aren’t really that many games made by one person, FEZ, Stardew Valley, Braid, and even up to a certain point Minecraft come to mind right away. Midnight Fight Express also belongs to this category of games, developed by a single father from Poland. Is this play worthy of being on the same shelf with the listed hits? Now let’s figure it out.
Interrogation room, the main character is sitting in handcuffs and for some reason without outerwear. Almost nothing is known about the suspect, so the detectives call him the Ghost.
The whole plot seems to be a story about the events of that night. The main character has long forgotten his past, literally, and one evening a drone (yes, an ordinary drone) enters his apartment and convinces that a certain Boss is trying to conquer the city, and only the protagonist can free the metropolis from potential tyranny. But for this the hero has time only until dawn. During this night, players will visit four dozen different missions, kill several thousand opponents with no moral compass, and uncover the secret of the past hero whom everyone calls Babyface and Droney.
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The gameplay is based on hand-to-hand combat using everything that is not glued to the floor. The game does not require you to memorize and use all available combinations, almost all fights take place by alternating “two weak hits, one strong” and throwing chairs or bottles. They allow you to raise weapons of opponents: clubs, sticks, oars, knives, and often even firearms that have limited ammunition that cannot be replenished, and after shooting an empty machine gun or pistol can be thrown at the enemy.
And on paper or even on the trails, it all looks stylish and dynamic. In practice, the symbiosis of hand-to-hand combat with the alternation of melee and firearms only occasionally develops into an elegant but deadly dance worthy of John Wick. You knock down one opponent, immediately counterattack another, taking away the knife from him, which at the same second you throw at the enemy with a machine gun, he is thrown away leaving the weapon on the floor, the hero raises the firearm and finishes off the rest of the opponents in several bursts. And all this is accompanied by a dynamic soundtrack that comes close to Noisia’s work for DMC: Devil May Cry. At such moments, you involuntarily scream at the screen “Wow, I want more!”, But, unfortunately, such episodes do not happen often.
The developer made a whole tree of talents, but in practice the combat system is not as complex as in the same SIFU. Talent points are awarded after passing each level and getting all the skills ahead of time just by farming experience will not work. Additional skills are unlocked only upon reaching story points, which is a normal practice for such games. Unnecessary talents can be deactivated, but the points spent for their purchase are not returned, so you still need to think before buying this or that skill. Even after completing the tasks, dollars are credited, for which you can get costumes for the character and separate full-fledged skins.
Missions take an average of 7 minutes, and over the course of 40 episodes we will be taken to a dozen different locations. From residential backyards and construction sites to private clubs, a moving train, and even game developers’ offices. The last one is very funny. Almost every location has a level with a certain condition that accompanies the entire mission. This is a falling container, a sniper in a helicopter or firefighters who water the arena with a hose and knock them down if they get hit by a jet.
But it happens that these elements are poorly balanced and annoying. For example, in one of the locations, a chopper constantly drives around the arena and knocks down, or even worse, rams into other nearby motorcycles. Everything around explodes, including our hero. And the problem is not in the idea, but in the implementation, because the passage of this arena is delayed precisely by the poor reading of the movement of the motorcycle, and do not forget that in addition to transport, there are a dozen enemies on the screen that do not allow you to rest for a second.
Sometimes they give you a ride on a jet ski or shoot a machine gun from a moving truck. Such elements add variety to the gameplay and do not let you get sad from the repetitiveness of the gameplay.
There are not many bosses in the game, there is a canonical helicopter boss, and something exotic like … a combine. I’m not joking, this is actually quite a simple boss in terms of mechanics, like everything in this game, but difficult to pass. In fact, the game is well balanced in terms of difficulty, and some glitches are perceived as another challenge that needs to be spent a little more time on. And everything would have been so until it came to the final reptile, the actual Boss himself. Midnight Fight Express shows by example how to destroy a good gaming experience with a broken and completely unfair final fight.
Remember how in the classic Mortal Kombat, the enemy could pinch us on the edge of the arena and beat us to the last breath without any chance of escaping? The final boss of this game constantly uses this skill. It knocks down and beats the one who is lying down, not allowing him to get up, or he clamps him in the corner and does the same. I’m not talking about the complete randomness of attacks, which are almost impossible to count, and half a dozen ordinary opponents who constantly interfere, although in theory they should give us some kind of weapon for easier killing of the boss. Even the revolver of the protagonist, endowed with several types of cartridges, does not help – ordinary, stun gun, disorienting, and a few more. It recharges for a long time and only disables ordinary opponents for a few seconds, and it has practically no effect on the boss if he has already begun his attack, so even a shocker will not stop him.
I spent about 40 minutes on its passage, and within the framework of the concept of the game, in which each mission is completed in 5-10 minutes, this is just a bad balance and unscrewing the complexity for no reason. Having killed hundreds of enemies, the final boss should be difficult and interesting, but this difficulty should only show that he is really cooler than ordinary opponents, but Jacob Dvinel, the game developer, for some reason decided that this difference should be like between a kindergarten (simple opponents) and Iron Man (boss).
After completing each mission, a rating is calculated and additional tests and tasks are opened. Complete the mission in a certain time without missing a single hit or without death, or collect all collectibles, here these are gold teeth falling out of opponents, but in order to collect all 10 you need to complete the mission several times. But whether you want to do this is a big question, although the developer has relied on re-passing. You can turn off all dialogues and intermediate screensavers, they are squandered here quickly like video cassettes. The game also has several difficulty modes and a separate one that allows you to customize the settings for yourself, which should also make the game more interesting.
Such a game could not bypass the cultural heritage of cinema and games. Here you have the Sons of Anarchy, and Kyler Terden who needs to fill his face and Horse Bo Jack, and splicers from Bioshock and references to Bane from Batman, and The Last of Us Part II, and a whole car of recognizable characters, events and settings. There was even a place for fantasy, but here without spoilers, sometimes the game really knows how to surprise.
Midnight Fight Express is a really good game, especially when you realize that it was made by only one person. But minor flaws, a clichéd plot, during which you shout out several times “This is a twist!” and an unbalanced final boss, do not allow putting the game on a par with the hits that I mentioned at the beginning of the review.
