Ehhhhhhh.

Starts off pretty fun but the awful overbearing story and the lack of variety in the enemy design becomes tiring by the time I hit the end credits. There's also an insane range in terms of level quality. Some were excellent and some were terrible. All of those vehicle sections should have been cut.

Not poorly made by any means, but definitely not something I'll be coming back to. Would rather just play Hotline Miami again or pick up Sifu.

I like this game, but I really wanted to LOVE this game. MFE is pretty intense with its hand-to-hand combat with extremely stylistic animations. A lot of people only liked the hand-to-hand and disliked the guns, but I disagree. Combo'ing an enemy before taking his gun and shooting the killing bullet, then doing a 180 before shooting a guy and then doing a gun finisher while intense club music is playing almost fulfills my dream of a John Wick-esque game. And while I really like that concept, it unfortunately does not have enough depth to carry this game.

To explain my point of the lack of depth, let's consider the enemy aggro system. Suppose every enemy in the room is revving for an attack at me. What I do to avoid that, is simply to grab a person. After grabbing a person, all enemies cease aggro, which is disappointing. I would have liked to seen something like if I grab a person while someone is about to punch me, I could push the person I grabbed into the fist, and maybe give me a bit of i-frames so I don't get shot by a stray bullet. Something I always try to do is to grab an enemy and move them towards a person who's about to shoot from their gun, but unfortunately they never shoot because all aggro was taken away.

In addition to the above, another point to my lack of depth argument is countering. You can counter whenever you want even in the middle of an attack, which is fine because in realistic mode, you do not get the button prompt, so you have to pay attention to an enemy's attack pattern. In theory this is nice. However, there is no punishment to countering when no one is attacking you. This means, even on the realistic difficulty, as long as you mash the counter button, your character will always counter, which makes the counter system very easy.

Overall, in the current lack of market for cool and stylistic John Wick-esque games, this game is satisfying on the surface level, but as you get deeper, the flaws become much more apparent and trivializes the game.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for December 2023, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before January 2nd, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

Brawling through a lawless city.

Midnight Fight Express does a lot of things right. The start of the game has a pumping beat, the combat feels tight, the levels are well laid out, there are challenges for each level, just a lot to do, and the idea of a fast past brawler can work. On paper, all of this is a good idea and in-game everything feels very polished.

The only problem is nothing ever really feels like it comes together. Nothing is bad, necessarily, but there’s just something that isn’t as exciting as each of the parts individually, and instead of a bad or a great game, it’s just average. The music becomes repetitive before the first hour is up even with different stages, the enemies change but not enough, there are upgrades but it will take many levels to earn them all and they don’t change the game as none of them will be required and the only thing that challenges unlock is cosmetics, that don’t affect the gameplay, at least that’s the story we’re told over and over again. Again, nothing bad, but my excitement went down over the first hour, just as it did the last time I played this.

Pick this up, you want an interesting case study in how a game just fails to come together, or just want a beat-\em-up game for a while. Sadly that’s all this is, and it’s a shame, but I will say this, with everything that works here, I’d be interested to see if this studio can turn it on with another title that meshes a bit better because the framework is here, just something is missing.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/FzxvEceV60k

If you just want to mess up and beat up a few guys, this is the game for you. Midnight Fight Express offers a variety of fighting styles and weapons, as well as many different level designs and enemies. The fighting animations are quite successful and the combos you will make with different weapons offer a great visual feast. The story evokes a slight element of curiosity, although not much. The game, which also makes references to many films and games, has also done a successful job humorously. Noisecream has also done a very successful job in terms of music. The parts I don't like are the ridiculous difficulty of some levels. While I could pass some levels without difficulty at the hard level, at some levels I had to reduce the difficulty quite a bit because the number of enemies and the environmental factors found in the level made the game incredibly frustrating. But in general, if we look at it, I can say that it is a very successful beat-em up game. I recommend you to play Midnight Fight Express with its pleasant visual style and satisfying fights.

This is one of those hidden gems of the last year. I just found it randomly in ps plus and wanted to try it out with little to no expectations. I must say that I am blown away by its action. It is literally a John Wick simulator through and through.

It is a non-stop action game for 5 hours straight, the flow of combat is perfect and very immersive thanks to great sound design and fantastic animations. Especially gun combat is simple but very effective, you get to steal the guns from your enemies in the heat of the moment and rip apart the rest of the guys in seconds. You can even do close combat finishers with guns aka doing gun fu like John Wick.

If you're looking for a fast paced beat em up, just turn your brain off and go for it. It makes you feel like a badass.

Lastly, I want to shout out to the developer, the guy did this game by himself and the result is surprisingly great. I hope we'll see more stuff from him with a passionate team.

This game disappointed me, despite what it promised in the beginning. At first, it’s a better John Wick game than the actual John Wick game, a beautifully fun dance between hand-to-hand combat and shooting. I liked it more than Hotline Miami at first.

However, the game goes on too long and it adds in unnecessary unfun gimmicks to the combat after the halfway point. Devs, just let games end while they’re in their prime. Please. Also the story was tonally inconsistent with kinda cringey dialogue and I also clipped out of bounds during finisher animations twice. Lol.

5/10, unfinished