EDIT: Spoilers are now open!

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Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our 17th game is Midnight Fight Express. The target completion date is September 19, 2022.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after September 19, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Midnight Fight Express?

An isometric brawler about an amnesiac man in a city beset by gangs. Features interactive objects in the environment and an unlockable skill tree.

How long is Midnight Fight Express?

How long to beat lists it as 4.5 hours long

my time with this one is simple ... looks interesting but doesn't want to load , kepts hanging up when i try to boot up the game even after trying to reinstall it ... looks like i wont be playing this one .

Overall I quite enjoyed it! Once you start unlocking a variety of moves you can chain together, you can get into a bit of that good ol' ultraviolent flow. Before you do that it can feel a bit limited - granted, it is classic game design to introduce complexity slowly as to not overwhelm the player: I probably would have been if everything had been dumped on me at once.

It is a little rough around the edges, perhaps, not quite janky, but something about the feel of it that might keep it from being fully tubular, and it ends up being just a pretty good time.

There are certain parts that can kick your butt a bit if you are not quite in the zone, and it can get a bit chaotic. And towards the end it starts introducing enemies with more resistances that I did not enjoy fighting as much. Mostly because I'm bad, sure, but I feel it limits your options when fighting them. I could see someone bouncing off the game if it starts feeling too frustrating.

Though I will say this does make it good fun to return to earlier levels with all the skills and just completely wrecking shop - I recommend doing this if the latter levels irk you.

Edit: Oh uuh the story! There is one. Your milage may vary, but I think it's serviceable - there are some funny lines here and there, but it is crass in a way that might rub some the wrong way. Not sure it quite works when it tries to get a bit more serious towards the end - not uncommon with media that spends most most of its time being wacky, I think. Sorry for rambling, I don't really do words good.

I have some pretty mixed feelings about this game. It plays like a combination of Hotline Miami and Bloodroots, with Hotline Miami being an obvious aesthetic influence. I love Hotline Miami but didn't really like Bloodroots, however I think this game somehow manages to do the melee combat thing well, while making gunplay very annoying. I liked the hand to hand fighting and ability to pick up any weapon in the environment, especially as the game advances and you get more abilities so you can do things like parry, do finishers, and use your secondary gun to even the score. I think the game starts you off with too few options, but by the end you've got plenty of tools and it feels really good.

I also like the way the game looked and really appreciated the pulsing soundtrack. The storytelling was a bit hit or miss and had the typical indie game issue of trying to tell an affecting story while also being intentionally extremely goofy and it just did not work. You can't make me care about my dead son in a drone when you're also messing around with pig men and zombies and all sorts of other nonsense. You just can't, so don't try.

The guns, on the other hand, are just a massive pain. It's too hard to keep track of all the enemies when they send waves of gun wielding dudes after you and your health can just get melted in a second or even less so you're madly rolling around trying to stun enough of them that you can grab your own gun and get even. It never felt cool and smooth like a John Woo film it felt like a mad desperate scramble to survive, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing but I don't think the controls are precise enough to really make even that feel good. Instead all too often it felt random. Does some guy pop a shot off while you're out of your roll and before you can roll again, thus giving you literally no way to defend? Congrats, you just lost a health chunk!

And that's another big issue I had with the game. Unless it's buried somewhere in the perks system there is no way to refill your health except regenerating to the top of the last bar you have a piece of or just dying. This was especially frustrating when you enter a room with a new boss whose patterns you don't know and are just like "well I guess I'm going to die here."

The vehicle levels were just bad and felt cheap compared to the rest of the game. They're at least short.

As usual I'm complaining a lot but that's because I really enjoyed the core of the game (at least when it wasn't gun focused) but it felt like the game wanted me to engage with it in a totally different way than I wanted to. I wanted to play a cool, stylish, overhead brawler. It wants to be a skill-focused game that you run again and again to get perfect (the scoring system and all the stuff locked behind it shows this) but it has too much plot and not precise enough controls for that. It's better as a straightforward brawler but it fights against that, giving you poor grades your first time through and making the baffling decision to hide its perks (that would make the game easier) behind getting 10 gold teeth in a level which you never will if you just play to finish the level, rather than giving you new perks every 10 gold teeth you get overall.

None of this ruined the game for me. I liked it. The stylish visuals, funny gags, and smooth hand to hand combat made it enjoyable. But the completion levels are dismal. On Xbox it's well under 5% and even on PlayStation, where you have to pay for the game (so you don't have Game Pass dabblers trying it and then moving on), only 16% of players are getting to the end. For a game that's under 5 hours and not THAT punishing if you die and rely on checkpoints that's very bad. It's on par with Bloodroots, a game that I found many times more difficult and personally did not like (but did finish.)

I'd love to see a sequel to this that builds on its strength and leans more into the hand to hand stuff with a better progression system (perks unlocked as you go; a better skill tree that doesn't make the beginning so limited) and its very nice aesthetics. It ends on a cliffhanger so the developer is at least thinking about it.

I guess nobody else was moved to comment on this. I have some more gripes I thought of though

1) By the time you get the rope there are way too many enemies who can resist it. That made me mostly ignore it because it's not always obvious to me how can resist and who can't, and being resisted leaves you open to counterattack. I understand you can go back and do earlier levels with it, but it's not super fun to get an upgrade that is mostly useful in replaying previous parts.

2) In general there are too many resistances later in the game. @manburger mentioned this, but it's pretty frustrating. I'd rather have a game focused on fun than challenge, and what's fun is stylishly beating up bad guys not having them ignore your attacks by being uninterruptable and take off half your life in one shot.

3) The zombies in the graveyard level are especially annoying as one hit kills. Most of them are easy to kite (and kiting is a very effective strategy for much of the game, especially with infinite ammo on your secondary gun) but some move so quick that I felt like if I didn't know they were coming I had zero chance even to turn and start shooting. Just a weird decision. In general I hated all the 1 hit kill death traps in the game be they helicopter gunships or cars on the highway or those weird construction equipment levels. They often gave you very little lead time to respond, which once again was extremely limiting in how you played those areas because you always had to be ready to dodge.

That's a lot of whining about a game that I ultimately did like, but I think it explains why so many people never finished. It's a game that's mostly fun to play with some difficulty spikes that really are not fun, and I think it loses a lot of folks to those spikes.

I don’t have much to add to the conversation, I did not manage to finish it. I got to around mission 13 or so.

It was fun and got better as you unlocked more abilities. I never got used to the flashing red “dodge” attacks but the parry attacks felt good. There were definitely a few bottlenecks that were due to difficulty spikes. The encounters were either very easy or extremely difficult.

The levels themselves were also all over the place, especially in length. Some levels would be just a couple of minutes long, others approaching thirty minutes, at least if you die a few times.

Finally, I agree the vehicle levels are kind of just filler.

Overall it’s…fine. Turtles is a much better beat ‘em up. Looking forward to that next time!

@bigsocrates:Cogently and coherently put, (not a hairball of words like I do) I agree, and similarily think the game would be served by a sequel that smooths out the pain points. Still, a fairly impressive sophmore effort.

@bb4lake: Aw yeah, I also had a great time with the Turtles! Some classic beat 'em up action is just what the doctor ordered.

I stuck with this game a little longer. Maybe 20ish levels in I hit the motorcycle level.

Immediately closed the game and uninstalled after a dozen or so deaths that felt unavoidable.

Time to move on, lol.

I've gone back to this game a few times since I finished it to grind out some achievements and just mess around, and with the story turned off and all the abilities open it is a lot more fun and what I wanted out of it. I feel like to some degree the story and unlock process is like a massive tutorial for what the game wants to be, but it's not a good way to go about it because too much of it feels frustrating.

And @bb4lake is right the vehicle sections are really bad. But once you're done with the story you can pick and choose what to revisit unless you plan to grind out all the challenges.