This action sandbox offers more than many a blockbuster. We introduce you to the exceptional project of a solo developer in detail.
I love brutal action cinema in which the protagonists fight and/or shoot their way through hundreds of opponents in the most stylish way possible. John Wick is just the latest in a long line of one-man-army-, revenge- and martial-arts-flicks, where I happily inhale all the popcorn in the first five minutes.
However, in my opinion, games rarely manage to transfer exactly this cinematic one-on-one feeling to my home computer – exceptions prove the rule, of course, and titles like Batman: Arkham or Ghost of Tsushima at least come close in my eyes. However, with their open world including countless side activities, they are simply too broad for me to deliver a truly focused adrenaline rush in which one unforgettable battle situation follows the next.
Whether I am competing against comprehensible opponents or faceless masses of enemies is ultimately not the decisive factor. Rather, I need that little bit of qualitative finesse that fascinates me in the long run. This can be a good portion of melancholy and hopelessness, like in the first two Max Payne games, which fans are still raving about two decades later. Or breathtakingly choreographed fight sequences that you would love to watch again in slow motion afterwards.
The challenge for developers is not to make their fights seem as if they were only composed of a small number of changing set pieces – even though they have to be operable with the limited number of buttons on a controller. Polish solo developer Jacob Dzwinel solves the dilemma with his top-down brawler Midnight Fight Express (MFE for short) in a supposedly simple way: absurd context-sensitive variety paired with buttery smooth motion-capture animations.
What it’s about: As a former underworld bigwig, you return abruptly from early retirement like John Wick to prevent organised crime from seizing control of the city before sunrise. The following gamescom trailer gives you a first impression of the gameplay, even if it only shows a fraction of what is included in the little powerhouse:
More of everything
How many weapons does a game need? How many finishers? Most developers answer that question with one to two dozen. Midnight Fight Express can only laugh wearily at that. I’ll summarise the proud numbers of the fighter for you:
- 100-150 weapons: Whether it’s a toilet plunger or a katana, a sledgehammer or a bazooka – MFE’s arsenal contains just about everything that players like to fight with. The whole thing is subdivided into a total of nine animation categories, which provide each weapon type with independent attack animations.
- Circa 100 finishers and 120 counter-attack animations: If you’re going to put stunt pros in motion-capture suits, you might as well make them sweat. Which animation plays when depends on you, your talent selection, your weapon, your opponent’s weapon and the opponent type.
- Interactive environment finishers: In addition to the already excessive catalogue of death-dealing moves, local conditions can also be incorporated into your choreography at any time. This can be a shaft, a drinks machine, a fan, a sink or a multitude of other environmental objects. In addition to various films, the developer openly cites Sleeping Dogs as one of the great role models.
- Extensive possibilities for individualisation: Thanks to learnable skills and combos, you can gradually specialise your fighting style. There are supposed to be a total of 200 unlockable contents, 150 of which are visual adjustments for your character alone. Six body regions can be individually dressed and even tattooed. Bosses will also sometimes have a full-body skin.
- Dozens of enemy types: The various opponents differ in hit points, abilities and defence strategies. Some of them carry shields or two weapons at the same time, although this is denied to the player.
- Three acts with 41 hand-built levels: Each section promises non-stop action, each to its own synth beats by composer Noisescream, and should take 5-10 minutes to complete, depending on the difficulty. The sandbox mode, which is unlocked in the course of the game, as well as crunchy challenges should make the total playing time 8-12 hours. In the three story acts you get to read 18,000 words of optional German-language dialogue (there is generally no voice output). But if you don’t feel like it, you can skip all that.
The composer provides a foretaste of the driving soundtrack in five mini-previews on his (Youtube channel)
flat graphics, deep combat system
It’s obvious that the Unity title won’t be dusting off any graphics awards with its rather spartan look, but as is so often the case, it’s the inner values that are the real draw. In this case, the depth of the central combat system.
In the brawls described as “hyperkinetic”, I upset opponents with combos of light and heavy attacks, then kick them out of the picture with effective finishers. Using colour-coded counterattack opportunities – similar to the Batman Arkham series – I can block attacks (white), parry (yellow; requires talent), or dodge them with a roll (red).
The aforementioned combo finishers require only two to three hits in quick succession, depending on the weapon, which push your opponent to below 50 percent health. In this way, I eat a huge number of enemies in quick succession – and thanks to the countless variables, in ever new ways.
Similarly to the kindred Hotline Miami, picked-up firearms have only a single magazine before they second-rate or throw away into unwieldy melee beaters. Proper melee weapons, on the other hand, break after six to ten attacks and require a return to my barely less-lethal fists.
Thanks to effects-rich physics simulation and excellent hit feedback, the combat feel is always comprehensible and turns every confrontation into a unique dance of death. So that I can also share them with friends, there is a built-in gif recorder like in My Friend Pedro. By the way, you can also turn off the blood effects or turn them up to exaggerated levels where even limbs fly around. The developer himself prefers the realistic standard setting.
Funnily enough, there is already a moveset mod (Nexusmods) that incorporates the fighting styles from Midnight Fight Express into the hardcore brawler Sifu. If you’re already itching in your martial arts muscles after this game presentation, feel free to read our review of it: Sifu has a stronger focus on one-on-one fights and, with its talent trees trimmed for this, allows you to individualise your fighting style even more than MFE.
Sifu in test: Sifu’s martial arts combat is among the best I have ever played.
A sandbox as I like it
Oh no, he compared it to Sifu. Surely that means Midnight Fight Express is also a badass kung fu dark souls for masochists, right? Not at all! Because in MFE, customisability is not only important for the appearance and fighting behaviour of your protagonist.
For one thing, the difficulty level can be customised down to the smallest detail: While tougher characters can play without any healing at all, your health regenerates partly by itself on the lower difficulty levels.
In the linear levels, however, there is little time for breathers anyway, because the game is actually designed for quick fights and quick deaths. The fair checkpoints regenerate my life completely after each death, so I’m not half-dead in front of a boss every time again.
On the other hand, you later unlock a sandbox or playground mode in which you are allowed to shape your game experience almost completely yourself. From enemy types to weapon variety to the music that plays, I can try out and rehearse my skills and combo talents to my heart’s content here.
If you want to measure your skills against others, you won’t get a multiplayer mode at release (the developer is at least thinking about a co-op arena with waves of opponents as DLC), but you will get level high scores and leaderboards.
At certain points in the story, the game provides me with AI companions. If I really don’t want to play with them, I can just shoot them down and move on alone. Yes, MFE really does let me play exactly as I see fit – right down to the last consequence.
Animations from the pro
The motion capture studio SuperAlloy Interactive is responsible for the tremendously smooth and varied animations. (In their portfolio), high-profile titles such as the action adventure God of War, the survival action game The Last of Us 2, the multiplayer shooter Destiny 2 or the series hit Altered Carbon also appear.
On the company’s 400-square-metre premises near Las Vegas, punches, kicks, jumps and throws were recorded for days using special XSENS suits, which are specially designed for such intense close combat operations. Meanwhile, developer Jacob Dzwinel watched the action from his home in Poland via Skype and worked out the numerous animations together with stunt coordinator Eric Jacobus.
The fighting techniques depicted in the game are a mixture of classic boxing and wrestling, the wilder brawling, the Korean martial arts Taekwondo and Hapkido as well as the Thai Muay Thai – also known as Thai boxing.
In this video you can see in an impressive way how the movements of the four stuntmen are transformed into animations in Midnight Fight Express:
After around three years of development, Midnight Fight Express is finally scheduled for release on Steam and all major consoles including Switch in the third quarter of 2022. A GoG version is also planned. Based on a telltale entry at (SteamDB), we are currently expecting the end of August.
Editorial conclusion
I know what you’re thinking: five hours of gameplay for a campaign run? That’s not even enough for a weekend! But because this action sandbox offers such enormous variety, I already know that I’ll spend at least five times as much time here, and it won’t just be me. It was the same with Hotline Miami, which also only takes five hours for a single playthrough.
The real star of the show, however, is the abundance and quality of the animations. While Vampire: Swansong was a good game despite its gruesome animations, here a single developer, with the help of some stunt professionals, manages to conjure up an unprecedented fighting ballet on the screens.
I think Midnight Fight Express will be our best opportunity to replay our favourite action movies and add our own insane moves in the near future, especially if the sandbox mode becomes as granularly configurable as announced.
What do you think of MFE? Can you be convinced by the wonderfully choreographed and varied battles or are you ultimately put off by the top-down perspective? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments!
