I don’t enjoy fighting games. I like the “idea” of fighting games, I like watching someone else play them, but I despise playing them myself. You might think I don’t like the genre, gratuitous violence or have moral objections, but you’d be wrong.
I love violence, I love aimlessly instigating violence, and I’m someone who thinks of Quintin Tarantino movies as “wholesome”. No, my misgivings surrounding fighting games comes down to one thing and one thing only: I suck at them. It’s like there is a constant and insurmountable lag between what my eyes see, what my brain process and what my hands decide to do.
So when I first loaded up Midnight Fight Express, I fully intended to hand over the controller to my partner and watch them play while I sat there like a baby sibling holding an unplugged controller. But then something weirdly wonderful happened; I was actually good at it?
Midnight Fight Express is a well-crafted and addicting beat-em-up game. Players take control of a character called Babyface and wreak havoc across the fictional city of Tomorrow. The game is split into 40 levels and should keep you busy for around 5 hours, depending on how often you die and how thorough you choose to be.
Midnight Fight Express is also really attractive in its way. While I would never look at a screenshot for the game and be like, “DAMN! that’s nice” while playing, everything blends so well to create a world that looks, sounds and feels perfectly suited to each other in every way.
Now, as anyone who reads my reviews here will know, I’m a big campaigner for a story in a game. Midnight Fight Express has a story, and it’s even kind of interesting? But it’s also one of the most significant downsides to the game. When I started up Midnight Fight Express, I was planning to drink my energy drink and cause a ruckus. Before the game officially started – I was all out of energy drinks.
The problem with the story comes in that all I wanted to do was go forth and beat everyone up, but oh no, I had to sit and read text box after text box of story that was frustrating enough to make me sigh loudly each time it popped up but interesting enough that I didn’t just want to skip through it all together., Peak first-world struggles.
Throughout the 40 levels of Midnight Fight Express, you’re sure to have moments where you feel like Mike Tyson high on Charlie Sheen’s tiger blood. Then there are moment’s when you’ll feel like nothing more than a ragdoll for enemies to throw around, but you will never not be entertained.
