The Midnight Walkers is the latest entry into the extraction shooter space, emerging as the genre is fast becoming the most saturated thing in gaming. It comes from Oneway Ticket Studio, bringing bloodthirsty zombies and a towering ‘mega complex’ to a niche typically populated by military-focused shooters like Escape from Tarkov.
While the premise is fresh and intriguing, Oneway’s delivery of The Midnight Walkers leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a game hampered by inherent flaws and too many poor design decisions, and ultimately, it’s easy to see it falling flat before too long.
Read on to check out my full review of The Midnight Walkers, now in early access from Oneway Ticket Studio.
Oneway Ticket to Implosion
I entered The Midnight Walkers with aplomb, eager to explore yet another extraction title, but this time, with zombies hampering my every move. You’d think that zombies would find their way into extraction games more often, but sadly, that’s not the case. That’s why I was so eager to leap head over heels into TMW and crush some undead skulls while looting and shooting.
Unfortunately, I was rendered disappointed by The Midnight Walkers very early on.
The issues start with the game’s appearance. It doesn’t look awful, but there are far too many open and empty areas, rinse-and-repeat loot circles, and flat visuals that don’t inspire a deeper probe through the environment on offer.
The Midnight Walkers is set in a sprawling mega complex, in which every floor offers something different. On one level, you’ll find an office, on another, a hospital, on a third, a construction site, and so on. It doesn’t make the most sense, but it’s a way for the developers to offer multiple environments without building several maps.
That mega complex is a bore to explore, and amid the confusing layouts, nonsensical constructs, and dull atmospheric attempts to brighten up some areas, I was disappointed to see gen AI art and had very little reason to search beyond the obvious.
The game’s gimmick of going between floors to brighten up your adventure and lengthen your ‘raid’ got old fast, as did getting in suffocating fights with other players in the stairwells between levels. It also doesn’t help that I needed to read the guide on how to actually get out of a raid three or four times before I understood it. It’s too overly complex, and they’ve tried to reinvent a simple wheel.
Movement Mistakes and Design Dilemmas
Arguably, the biggest issue with The Midnight Walkers is how unbelievably slow it all is. You’d think that running from zombies eager to chew your flesh would put a little pep in your step, but that’s not the case in The Midnight Walkers. Players are bound to move at a snail’s pace, and that extends to their attack speed.
I played as a heavy character with a massive hammer and swung my weapon like a sloth. I thought, ‘That’s fair enough, he’s a big guy.’
I switched to the ‘assassin’ character with a kukri-style blade… Same issue. It seems that only when you get grinding and levelling up will your speed increase, and until then, you’re bound to be as slow as hell in the midst of the apocalypse. Unfortunately, that slowness extends to interacting with the environment.
Even opening doors has a timer. It takes two seconds to push open a door, and looting containers is also a slow and painful process.
I need to go back to the combat again, because the design flaws really drag the game down here. You need to be brutally close to enemies to successfully strike them, which leaves you open to a two-tap death that brings you to your knees in seconds. In an extraction-based game, that’s a death sentence in more ways than one.
If it wasn’t for the fact that you get a ‘default loadout’ for each character class, I would have given up after my first five deaths.
Only the ranged character, Lockdown, was enjoyable to play as. This fighter wields a bow and a spear, and getting that distance from enemies was crucial to my survival for a few raids. Even then, it was a boring slog, and the dozens upon dozens of quests (some of which have strange, misspelt titles) weren’t enough to entice me further into the game.
I also didn’t get too far into the game because of a troublesome bug that prevented me from completing the very first quest in the list, which was simply to consume a drink and use a bandage.
The Midnight Walkers Review: Verdict
The Midnight Walkers won’t last long in the extraction space. It has launched to a negative reception and is ‘Mixed’ on Steam as I write this review. It’s cheap, but that means nothing when many better games exist. You also need to pay extra to unlock key rewards that are slightly pay-to-win (extra stash space, for instance).
I should have known something was up when the developer featured a topless, hairy streamer in the gameplay trailer for this title.
Don’t make this your first foray into the world of extraction games, as you’ll regret it every step of the way. I found it almost impossible to uncover a redeeming feature for The Midnight Walkers, and it’s not the ‘Dying Light but as an extraction shooter’ that I was praying it would be.
Are you interested in giving The Midnight Walkers a try? Let us know what you’re thinking on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
The Midnight Walkers
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The Midnight Walkers
Grant's adoration for gaming started on the Amstrad CPC in 1996. Now, he's a multi-platform expert gamer with a deep love for the industry, a passion for esports, and more…
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