The Midnight Walkers

I went into The Midnight Walkers genuinely wanting to like it. The pitch is solid: a PvPvE extraction shooter set inside a multi-floor mega-complex called Liberty Grand Center, where you fight zombies, loot rooms, and try to escape before other players or the spreading poison gas end your run. That premise has teeth. The reality, at least in its current Early Access state, is a lot more frustrating. The four classes, Brick (heavy hammer tank), Crow (dagger assassin), Lockdown (bow sniper), and Margarita (support who mixes buffs and heals), look good on paper. The arsenal, revolvers, break-action shotguns, bolt-action rifles, katanas, daggers, sledgehammers, has enough variety to suggest real build diversity down the line. And there are genuine moments of tension, particularly when a mutated Acid Spitter rounds a corner or a Rammer charges through your trio mid-loot. The vertical layout of Liberty Grand Center, hopping between floors via elevators and stairs while random zones fill with toxic gas, is a smart design idea. It should produce the kind of forced movement and improvised decisions that extraction shooters live on. The problem is everything around those moments. Movement speed is slow across all classes until you grind up perk slots, and the interactivity of the world compounds that sluggishness. Doors have a roughly two-second open timer. Looting containers takes longer still. In a genre where time-to-decision is everything, that friction kills the pacing stone dead. The combat system leans heavily melee, but blocking and parrying are almost entirely absent. Only a couple of weapons can block at all, and the hit registration has been reported as unreliable enough that swinging at a zombie can feel like guessing. The netcode under Early Access conditions is another concern. Server disconnects mid-run, lag spikes during combat, and objects failing to render are patterns that come up repeatedly in player feedback. For a game that punishes death with full loot loss, unstable servers are not a minor inconvenience. The progression loop has structural issues too. Experience rewards are weighted so heavily toward simply extracting (roughly 1,500 XP per extraction, versus ten per zombie kill) that grinding past the early levels turns into a speedrun-the-exit exercise rather than actual gameplay. The trader mission system is linear, meaning one blocked quest stops all your quest progress cold. The player population is thin enough that solo queueing can be a long wait, and in a live PvPvE game, low server pop is a compounding problem. Class balance also leans badly toward Brick at the moment, while Lockdown's bow-sniper kit gets outpaced quickly against gear-heavy opponents. There is a foundation here worth watching. The dark atmosphere, the verticality, the multi-vendor marketplace with player trading unlocking at level 5, and the genuine variety in zombie types (Walkers, Runners, Smashers, Rammers, boss encounters) point toward something that could be decent post-1.0. The developer is communicative, pushing patches, and receptive to feedback. But communicative studios in Early Access is a promise, not a product. Right now, The Midnight Walkers is a game that asks you to absorb real friction in exchange for potential. That is a trade worth making only if you have patience to burn and a reliable squad to play with.

Fred · Scout Team

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