Midnight Fight Express doesn’t waste time with a lengthy opening story or setup. You are put into the role of a sleeper agent who must take down a rising group of baddies in the city using your special fighting prowess. Midnight Fight Express isn’t trying to be a deep story with multiple layers, this is a beat ‘em up as evident from your customizable character and action-themed opening.

Why this simple setup works is Midnight Fight Express is accessible to everyone. There are multiple difficulty levels that will definitely test you if you want a truly old-school experience or become a literal killing machine and barely take any damage. Accessibility is important in a genre such as this because not everyone wants the SIFU level of technique in their action brawling experience; some want a simpler design and Midnight Fight Express delivers.

While it might not be a one-button title, Midnight Fight Express isn’t exactly a complicated game to play. You have a light/heavy attack that can be alternated depending on how hard you hold the attack button, a guard move that can allow a counter, a dodge for unblockable attacks, and various upgrades to add to your fighter’s abilities. Midnight Fight Express constantly gives upgrade points when you beat a level—of which there are 40 of them—allowing you to feel your character transform into a true walking, fighting machine! Levels also won’t be overly complex or push you to perform extreme moves but they do have neat little themes like having to jump from rooftops or dodge helicopter gunfire while fighting the enemies dubbed, “bozos”. Midnight Fight Express is very fun and quite easy to grasp—especially if you played any of the Batman games as of late—which made us smile as we started to see our minor skills evolve after a few hours.

Grab your best pair of headphones and turn the volume up! Midnight Fight Express’s soundtrack is perfect and you’ll want to hear it all. Midnight Fight Express has a rather large OST filled with various tunes that just fit each level’s theme perfectly. We rarely found a song we didn’t like and more often than not, we would maybe waste a bit too much time looking for every little thing in a level to just keep hearing the tunes play out.

Okay, it almost seems Midnight Fight Express is perfect but we do have one issue with the game and that is the visuals. Character models and levels look extremely dated and can be a bit of a distraction when the game does focus on the story or zooms in for maximum effect. Your character model looks like a 3D-printed object sometimes and it’s why we found ourselves quickly customizing him to be at least somewhat cool looking. Midnight Fight Express luckily doesn’t live and breathe by the visuals but we are sure many will unjustly judge this title by the way it looks and that is a bit of a shame.