Midnight Fight Express is a new isometric brawler created by one man, Jacob Dzwinel, and revealed at Gamescom. The gameplay, and to a certain degree, the artstyle, look like they draw inspiration from the Hotline Miami games, now on Xbox.
The trailer for Midnight Fight Express is a short one, and so the tone of the game is somewhat difficult to pin down. While Hotline Miami has a disturbing, surreal tone like the player is trapped in a nightmare, with Midnight Fight Express it's tricky to tell how much is satire and how much is serious. At least one scene, however, is definitely satire.
RELATED: Biggest Gaming News of the Week: 8/23/21 – 8/30/21
The scene takes place right at the end of the trailer, and it's a callback to an infamous scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The scene, recently trending on Twitter, is called "No Russian," for a line spoken by one of the characters. Several characters, the protagonist included, are riding an elevator and, as part of a larger plot, they step out after the line is spoken and proceed to gun down civilians in an airport. The scene in Midnight Fight Express seemingly starts the same way, but has a very different result.
The player character, dressed in nothing but pants, shoes, and a horse mask (almost certainly another direct Hotline Miami callback) enters the elevator after the line "no Russian" is spoken. He then proceeds to beat up all the gunmen inside, despite their advantage of numbers and guns. It's almost certain that whatever massacre was planned by the men in the elevator, it is thoroughly foiled by the protagonist. Even though the original "No Russian" scene was almost very different, it was probably never this different in the original draft for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
As to why this scene is parodied in Midnight Fight Express at all, at this point, it's still impossible to say. If the game is more serious, it could be a commentary on violence in some way, similar to Katana Zero talking about the horrors of war, something hopefully expanded on in the upcoming DLC.
If Midnight Fight Express has a less serious tone, this might have been included as nothing more than a joking reference to a violent scene in an already comically violent game. It will certainly be a fun task to compare which is more violent, Midnight Fight Express or the game revealed right before it, Cult of the Lamb.
Midnight Fight Express is coming to PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One in Summer 2022.
MORE: Every World Premiere at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2021
