I have kind of stepped off attempting to play every single PS-Plus Extra game because I realize that between my work and social life, dedicating as much time as it would take to play all of them for an hour is something that I simply do not have the time to do. I'm STILL going to try to check out as much of them as possible but another factor is that I sometimes really like a game and will play it for 20 hours or more and that just makes the queue even longer.
Midnight Fight Express looked from the video like something I had a chance to enjoy but well, the proof is in the pudding as they say. So here we go.
This game is included in a PS-Plus Extra account as well as Premium. I do not know if it is something you can get your hands on in a standard subscription. My guess would be probably not.
We started out on a bad note because the game took ages IMO to load and then even once you were in the game, the loads just kept coming, this is something that really irritates me about any game and I don't understand why a game such as Ghosts of Tsushima can have short loading times but a game like this one, that doesn't even have much in the way of graphics or voice acting, has to load so often.
I don't even know what you would call this game, but it kind of reminds me of the beat-em-ups of the early days of gaming but obviously, a lot more fluid. Midnight Fight Express does a pretty good job in the tutorial stages of showing you the basics of the game and it is simple enough that you are very unlikely to lose even if you are a completely inept gamer.
I can tell already just in the first 20 minutes of playing this game that it is going to get quite repetitive pretty fast and I suppose that is ok because there aren't a great many buttons to memorize even though I could do without a few of the features that I consider to be quite unnecessary such as needing to "focus" in order to scan a room for usable items or things that you are supposed to find. This isn't a puzzle game so when beat-em-ups try to over-expand their features I am more annoyed by it than I am impressed.
The soundtrack is cyber-punk-ish, and that appeals to me but the one aggressive track that they played during the entire tutorial was very loud and didn't vary a great deal. If that doesn't change as the game goes on I don't see myself playing this for very long.
Something that differentiates this game from other beat-em-ups that I have played in the past, sometimes Double-Dragon distant past, is the skill upgrade tree that I suppose I kind of expect in games these days. This is where the game can become unique I guess, but it also means that the game is going to become more complicated, which may not appeal to casual gamers like me.
I recall how in games that I absolutely loved such as God of War that a vast majority of the upgrades that I ended up getting ended up being something I never used anyway, so I don't know how much this is going to affect my gameplay. I am more of a simplistic punch punch block roll punch punch kind of guy.
We'll see.
So far, and I have only played an hour or so I can say that there are some pros and cons to this game
Pros
- it is simple enough that you can just jump right in and play
- the tutorial is excellent and really does a great job of introducing you to the game's mechanics
- the difficulty, at least at the beginning is simple enough that it isn't going to frustrate new players out of continuing
- no unnecessary spoken dialogue and very little in the way of useless cutscenes (this is completely subjective of course, some people like that sort of thing)
Cons
- The loading screens take way more time than I feel a game of limited graphical sophistication actually should take
- The music is uninventive and repetitive, I turned it way down to nearly off just about 15 minutes into the game.
- The levels are meant to be repeated over and over again and this is something I never like in any game. I have no interest in leaderboards or speed-running
Overall, I think that you could probably get some sort of enjoyment out of this game because it is so easy to get into. I don't really see myself completing this game because well, basically every encounter I have experienced after an hour are the same thing essentially. I don't expect an extremely inventive and unique experience when playing a beat-em-up but I think there is a very real reason why games like this aren't often made anymore.