Midnight Fight Express is a game where you are a criminal who left the life but now has to come back for one last job to kill every other criminal in the city and thus save the city from crime. It’s a third-person action game whose combat system is basically Arkham but worse, although not so much worse that it isn’t any fun, and in which the combat is the whole game, there’s none of the rest of Arkham gameplay.
There’s a lot of variety in enemy appearances but relatively little in how they fight. The Bozos who serve as standard street criminal fodder at the beginning are basically the same as the Warriors and Earth Smashers who get into a gang war that you have to fight through are basically the same as the Death Bunnies who are knife-wielding crime strippers. There are lighter enemies and heavier enemies and some enemies have guns, which are very annoying to deal with but if you go straight for them to beat them to the death and take their gun before they run it out of ammo, you can unload the gun on their friends, which is good for some free kills. So it’s not like there’s no enemy variety at all. The Bozos at the start of the game have all of this stuff, though, and the only noticeable difference with most later enemy types is that their melee weapons have higher durability and their guns have more ammo and a higher rate of fire. The drops improve, and the number of enemies goes up so the game does get harder (managing large crowds is much harder than fighting enemies in twos and threes), but most enemies are Bozos with a different model. There are some exceptions to this, the rat mutants spit out plague bile that leaves a lasting hazard on the ground and the zombies will pretty much instantly kill you if they get into melee with them so you have to use guns, but these kinds of enemies are the exception rather than the rule.
As that rundown of the enemies suggests, this game gets much more gonzo than it seems very quickly. It was always firmly in pulp territory, opening with a drone saying “literally every criminal in the city is in on a scheme to take over the city and only you can stop them! There’s some now!” And then you segue from there into street fights with violent criminals. It takes about 40 or 50 minutes in before you reach the rat mutants in the subway tunnels, though, and that’s the first sci-fi enemy. By the end it turns out the criminal takeover isn’t something generic like killing all the uncooperative civil servants to install a corrupt cadre in bed with the mafia, but rather killing everyone and uploading their brains into murderbots, because murderbots require brains for some reason, and apparently it’s not a problem if the sourced brains come from civilians you just murdered like six hours ago. Despite how crazy the plot quickly gets, the central character relationship between the protagonist and the hacker piloting the drone who’s guiding you to foil various components of the evil Operation Neo Dawn works pretty well. It’s by-the-numbers, but well-paced and well enough delivered that I felt some actual feelings about the two characters when I reached the end of the game. For a game that’s primarily a vehicle to kill spec ops squads with a katana, that’s more than was necessary.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s only about five or six hours long. I accidentally left the window open overnight so I have no idea how long I spent playing it exactly, but it was short enough that I hadn’t worn out on its gameplay when I got to the end, and that each beat of the plot and character arc came fast enough that I didn’t get sick of that, either. I keep bringing this up because I keep running into games that do it well and games that do it poorly: Five hours of all-thriller no-filler gold star content is better than ten or fifteen hours of mediocre hit-and-miss content.
Chamomile Has A Blog 