Midnight Fight Express Xbox Series X Review
| Game: | Midnight Fight Express |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Humble Games |
| Developer: |
Flow is one of the most crucial things when it comes to combat. Without it, a fight scene in a game or film can lack something. While Midnight Fight Express can hardly be called the most graceful of fighting games (its bone crushing and bloody brutality sees to this), it excels in capturing the flow of combat.
With your physically customisable character being dragged into the criminal underworld alongside a talking drone, the story of Midnight Fight Express serves its purpose, but it can be seen as an interruption to the game’s main highlight, the combat. The plot is silly at times, but the amount of it presented can feel excessive, particularly for this type of game. The dialogue during the story often disrupts the flow of gameplay, and while it holds some interest, many will just want to return to the action. Thankfully, the narrative scenes can be skipped on replay.
Midnight Fight Express has 41 levels to fight through, and it is basically a 3D modern-day iteration of the side scrolling fighting game (Streets of Rage etc) wherein the only real objective is to take on enemy after enemy through a number of urban environments. Levels are brief, some of which can be completed in as little as five minutes, and the game really does make you feel like a martial arts master if you are able to get into its violent rhythm.
When fighting you are able to parry attacks coming from any direction, quickly jump from one enemy to the next, make use of both weaker and stronger attacks, use context-sensitive finishing moves, and arm yourself with up to 100 weapons (including firearms with very limited ammo) over the course of the game. With skill trees between levels you are able to upgrade your combat moves, and there’s enough upgrades to unlock that you’ll still be unlocking them right up until the final level.
The combat feels as good as it looks, and is also accompanied by a fitting and noisy soundtrack from Noisecream. Animations are motion captured, and there’s a vast range of them, adding both variation and realism to the combat. Whether you are using simple kicks or punches, or wrestling, Muay Thai or Taekwondo finishing moves, everything hits hard and brutal, and is so very satisfying. Building a huge combo is always a fulfilling feeling, but the vast number of different enemies means that it isn’t always plain sailing, and you really have to adapt if you want your large combo strings to continue.
While you are mostly running about and bashing the bodies and faces of enemies in, you do get the occasional break from this in the form of vehicle sections. They’re a nice little piece of variation, and are great fun to play through as well.
Once you have completed a level, the game encourages you to return to it, but this time with three fresh challenges for you to complete. Also, if you previously missed out on the S rank, you could always try and reach it during such repeat plays. The scoring system is based on the time you take to complete the level as well as the varied ways that you take out enemies.
Midnight Fight Express is a modern-day fighting game done right. There’s enough variation in combat moves, weapons and enemies to keep things interesting, and the game has a bone-crunching effectiveness and flow to match, say, the Arkham games. If you are a fan of games with such a simple mindset, then here’s one that should do more than enough to please you, even if the absurdly amusing narrative interrupts the action from time to time.
