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.

Midnight Fight Express doesn’t hold it’s punches. It’s an adrenaline filled joy ride and a shameless homage to some of the greatest action schticks across pop culture.

From the Hotline Miami inspired soundtrack to the Call of Duty references and John Wick nods, MFE takes pride in it’s inspirations and influences and fully commits itself to going straight to the chase. It’s funny, it’s bloody but most of all, it’s fun as hell.

I really underestimated how much fun I would have with this when I first booted it up, but the gameplay immediately reminded me of a much more fast paced Sifu and that was enough to keep me going until the game just took flight by itself.

Saying this game is packed would be an understatement. It definitely doesn’t have the hour count as some triple AAA titles, but for an indie game like this to hold over 40 levels with so much enemy and design variety is truly commendable.

None of the missions ever feel the same and it’s one of the biggest qualities of this game beneath the tight and responsive beat ‘em up gameplay. There’s a real level of craft and passion put behind most of the encounters and references, to the point this almost feels like over the top action movie satire.

Midnight Fight Express hits the perfect balance because it understands what makes these hyper violent games and movies fun and exploits that trope under the player’s nose to keep this addictive feeling. It blends that S-rank adrenaline rush with some 4th wall parodies and an insane story, but by the time you reach the second half of the game you’ll be fully enthralled in what the game has to offer both in mechanics and plot.

A definite sleeper hit for me and I really hope they make a sequel to this.

To me it barely feels like a game. It seems like it might have something going for it at first with its attention to animation and a mash square combat system that seems like it'll become more complex with more weapons, enemy types, environments, skill unlocks. It's actually more the opposite, as you spend skill points, more button prompts start popping up above heads and it turns into a game of pressing whatever button it tells you while clamouring for whatever useful weapon shows up. And mashing square in between of course.

I don't know what to make of the narrative, what it's trying to get at with its verbose interrogation framing, it's 21st century drone Navi, its portrait of a totally anonymous and nonsensical city. I know it just wants to ferry us between a bunch of environments, but if it wants to do that, why do the environments feel so generic? It's all like looking into a dark gray shoebox. And yes there's unlocks and silly references and challenges and a practice room and clothing and skill trees and basically anything else it can do to try to convince you this is something more than a braindead, ugly game with nothing to say or offer.

(The Dynamite Deka reference with the firefighters was alright though)

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

The worst kind of indie game, not because it is bad, but because it is utterly boring. The concept here is that the game tries to be a John Wick like beat em up/shooter where you need to beat up huge crowds in arenas with an increasing arsenal of martial art moves, but the game just does not know when to stop with this concept.

It is not fun at all, when you are doing the same thing over and over again, with a story that is bad, a gameplay that becomes shallow after 2 hours with repetitive enemy types, and horribly designed driving sections.

An awesome, button-mashy feeling brawler game that feels like it's trying to be the 3d version of Hotline Miami. Tons of fun abilities to fight the large variety of enemies and lots of references to action movies and videogames. Very fun!

I wanted to finish this in time for when it was removed from Game Pass, but I ran out of time. I was playing it the night before it was being taken off game pass and I got to the boss that drives the harvester farm vehicle thing and got frustrated. I probably died on that boss about 15 times, it was late, I had work in the morning, I hung it up. Maybe I'll return to it at some point in the future.

Combat is overall fantastic, the loop of hitting a parry, grabbing a pistol or melee weapon and absolutely unloading never gets old. The only really issue is some of the set-pieces and bosses which seem to forget how the combat flows, forcing you to move even though grapples and finishers (core parts of combat) slow you to a crawl.

I also found myself getting surprisingly invested in the plot and didn't find Droney anywhere near as annoying as some other reviewers. Some of his jokes are unfunny or badly paced but overall he's entertaining and without spoiling anything there's an explanation for why he acts as he does.

Games like Midnight Fight Express often try to base their gameplay and progression around a feeling of flow you'd get from fluid/frenetic combat and action.

This game, however, while sometimes delivering that "flow-state", is very inconsistent at that. Instead, most of the time I saw myself finding the section I was going through to be quite a slog. You can see the effects of your time spent on the game and your upgrades when you start beating hordes of enemies with little to no difficulty, but even then there are some sections that feel out of place, breaking up the rhythm.

Sure, the game got a couple of things right, namely its fitting music and fluid combat (which works well when it does hit, though not enough to make the worst levels feel fun to play).

Even then, it's a hard one to recommend, not offering enough in either style, depth of gameplay, or fun moments to make its problems passable. Don't think I'd call it straight up bad, but, at least for me, it didn't reach its existent potential do be a more worthwhile experience.