How would you and up to two other mates feel about creeping around a blackout commercial high-rise infested with resilient and wily zombies that are able to take you down in a few quick smacks? If that sounds of interest, then Oneway Ticket Studio’s hardcore, first-person survival/extraction game (and also its debut release) The Midnight Walkers could be for you. Since its release into Steam Early Access on January 29, we’ve been stalking stairwells in the dark and have come away with generally positive impressions of the Unreal 5 multiplayer title.
The Midnight Walkers turns an infected tower into a televised gladiatorial arena where criminals and reprobates are the stars, murdering one another for their loot and then extracting in noisy pods to do away with the spoils. Between runs, sell your unwanted goods on a player-driven marketplace and take on missions for the various vendors. It’s a terrific setting ripe with hellish corridors and open-plan deathtraps, super zombies that more-than-vaguely resemble Left 4 Dead’s, and a punchy melee combat system that makes for the promise of some ferociously fearsome multiplayer horror action.
Extraction games are having a moment currently, with Arc Raiders wowing us and Escape From Tarkov finally seeing its full release after eight years. Heck, the Marathon server slam is going off right now. If the brutal, risk-it-all nature of this genre is a turn-off, The Midnight Walkers is perhaps not for you. It’s a brittle experience of frustrating menus and quick, seemingly cheap deaths that can see players losing precious equipment they likely spent multiple runs acquiring. Its most immediate appeal is its darkness-drenched atmosphere and in-your-face, claustrophobic combat encounters that I thought evoked the great GTFO. Lots of sneaking around in enclosed darkness, careful not to court danger by gratuitously waving your torch and weapons around.
There are deactivated extraction pods everywhere. You can disable an active extraction pod like this one and take its key to use on a deactivated pod in a safer area
While there are ample ranged weapons to find in The Midnight Walkers, they’re unreliable and expensive compared to a solid, close-up murder tool. Think Dead Island. Your trusty weapon can be short, like a wrench, but it has quicker wind-up attacks, which means dancing within a foot of danger. A katana or shovel is going to allow some distance from your enemy, while also giving much more heft with a slower but deadlier charge. Miss your heavier swing or accidentally catch the weapon on a doorframe or furniture, then you’re probably close to fucked. Combat is very much about learning each weapon’s linear swing patterns, its inherent risks, and then switching out for the environment. Despite combat being largely confined to the simple comforts of a right and left mouse click, there is a surprising amount of depth and knowledge required to be a competent cranium crusher. Players will simply learn by doing, and that’s a huge boon for this game’s approachability and longer-term appeal.
For its Early Access launch, we get four quite distinct character classes off the bat. WellPlayed’s Zach Jackson and I started with the tank, Brick. He comes with a sledgehammer that most skulls won’t resist if swung correctly. He has the largest health pool and, therefore, is marginally more forgiving for new players to onboard with. There’s also the more fragile, damage-focused Crow and the bow-wielding ranged expert Lockdown. The most interesting is left until last with the Bartender. He gets to shaking his tins after you enter a string of directional inputs (like Helldivers 2’s stratagems). Once the brew is ready, you can drink it for the associated buff or healing effect, or splash it from afar upon your teammates for a dispersed effect.
One of the coolest things about The Midnight Walkers is that, for now, the game is set in a 15-storey building (with a basement). Each floor of The Liberty Centre is a distinct maze of varying loot richness, all drenched in terrifying darkness and littered with assorted zombie types. A single run will take place in either the top or bottom half of the tower across approximately 15 minutes. Every floor is appropriately its own unique flavour, serving a particular purpose, with applicable loot found within. Don’t mind the big crates lying about in the hotel and hospital full of machetes and arrows; whoever is broadcasting your crouched shuffling probably planted them there earlier.
Bows are great at ensuring survivability by forcing ranged encounters, but janky hit detection makes this an unreliable strategy
Now picture this. You might start in the densely foliaged (and frighteningly hard to safely navigate) Botanical Gardens. You’re waiting literal seconds at a time for wearable outfits, headgear, weapons, throwables, and more to populate in the containers you’re searching. After seven or so minutes, an alert goes off saying that the current floor and several others are about to be flooded with poison gas. You slowly trudge your way to the nearest exit, despite holding the sprint button, and reach a stairwell. The exit could also have been a fire escape or elevator, but these make enough noise to alert hostile players on the floors you’re entering or leaving. On your way down to the Broadcasting Station several floors below, you encounter another player on the stairs. The duel plays out almost comically, with you and the other player winding up attacks with sword and hammer, only to miss each other as you scuttle back and forth. Eventually, souping up a charged attack with one of your two assigned special abilities, you land two meaty swipes, and the opponent goes down. You’re now on a sliver of health, so you crack a cold one, smoke a dart, and go on your way feeling slightly recharged. You find that most of your opponents’ gear was class-specific and incompatible with yours, so you leave almost all of it.
That anecdote’s big event is me encountering another player, which is a bit far-fetched. Fresh characters start in Rookie servers, where they can reliably increase their persistent levels and unlock some slots for passive abilities. The loot is generally not great, despite the challenge still being quite high. A hard item level cap of 250 means that most players’ characters will be unable to play on this server type after a couple of successful, inventory-full extractions. That meant that the majority of my Rookie matches were solo affairs. Survivor lobbies, however, would see me match with as many as four other players during peak Australian hours (this matchmaking type can accommodate up to 16 players). Because the enemy AI is so fierce, most players would die pretty quickly, with me often breathing an unearned sigh of relief at the lack of opponents. However, between matchmaking and waiting in the subsequent playable lobbies, it has meant waiting sometimes as long as seven minutes before entering a roughly 15-minute match. Spending 50% of my active time in this game waiting is probably the most brutal challenge of all.
Special zombies in designated zones guard some of the best loot, like this faux-Spitter here
Of course, there is that Early Access roughness that is worth a disclaimer. My biggest concerns are about the stashed inventory system (where loot goes between matches). Firstly, inventory management in or out of matches is a real nightmare. There is no way to rotate bulky items, no auto sorting, and the stash that each character is allowed will fill after as few as four lucrative extractions. Adding an extra tab to every character is a one-time $22 purchase, which the Steam page oddly advises will be unavailable when the game fully launches. Stash space can also be crafted, but I never once encountered any of the required resources across my ten hours of play. This paywalling and convolution of stash expansion is perhaps my biggest gripe, preventing me from wanting to invest the time this game expects. Inventory nonsense and general Early Access wobbles aside, The Midnight Walkers has potential to be a fun distraction for the hardcore extraction crowd, but it doesn’t have the juice just yet to distract me from the thriving competition
The Midnight Walkers is currently available in Early Access on Steam.
Previewed on PC // Preview code supplied by publisher
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