Midnight Fight Express

I put hours into Midnight Fight Express before I stopped feeling like the game was bullying me, and I mean that as a compliment. Jacob Dzwinel built this thing largely alone, and from the first alley fight to the last rooftop scramble, the craft is visible in every frame of animation. This is a top-down isometric brawler with a propulsive premise: one ex-criminal, one talkative drone, one night to stop an entire city from collapsing into organized crime. The fiction is slim by design, and that discipline is the right call. The combat system is where Midnight Fight Express earns or loses you. It draws obvious comparisons to games like Sifu and the classic Batman Arkham formula - context-sensitive counters, crowd-control juggling, environmental weapons you can snatch mid-fight - but the isometric camera angle gives it a distinct identity. You are reading the entire arena at once, which means the difficulty is about awareness and rhythm rather than reaction to a single threat. Enemies telegraph their intentions, and the game rewards players who learn to chain takedowns, use grabs into throws, and cycle through the surprisingly deep moveset that unlocks progressively as you level up. Weapons - bottles, pipes, even firearms - feel appropriately chaotic. Firearms especially shift the tempo because enemies carry them too, and suddenly that arena awareness becomes survival calculus. The level design is punchy and relentless in the best sense. Stages are short but they rotate the context aggressively: you fight on a speeding train, on motorcycles, in flooded basement clubs. Each scenario introduces a wrinkle without overstaying its welcome. The pacing very rarely drags, which is an achievement for a solo developer. Where the game does stumble is in difficulty tuning at the mid-point. A handful of encounters spike hard and feel tuned for players who have already internalized the complete moveset, so newcomers can hit a wall that feels arbitrary rather than instructive. There is no mid-level checkpoint system to soften this, which will frustrate players who are not brawler veterans. The audiovisual presentation punches well above its indie budget. The isometric visuals are clean and readable without being sterile, and the soundtrack carries a genuine late-night energy - propulsive electronic beats that shift register exactly when the fights escalate. For a one-person project, the audio direction alone deserves attention. The Metacritic consensus landed at 76, which feels about right for a game that is brilliant in bursts but uneven in its accessibility. It is not a long game; you can finish it in six to eight hours. But those hours are dense and intentional in a way that bigger-budget brawlers rarely manage.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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