Just like battle royale before it, extraction shooters are in a boom period right now, and just about every studio, big or small, has been giving it a try with their own unique spins. Oneway Ticket Studio has offered its own take with The Midnight Walkers, which maintains the intense PvPvE gameplay you’d expect from the genre while also forging its own identity by including horror elements.
While most extraction shooters tend to focus on large outdoor environments where it’s you against other similarly-armed human enemies, the biggest threat in The Midnight Walkers, aside from other players, comes in the form of an undead horde. With the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse having taken place at some point, and you being stuck in the Liberty Grand Center Mega-Complex, The Midnight Walkers makes a pretty strong first impression. The focus on more indoor environments is a unique one, and while we’ve seen non-human NPC enemies before in titles like ARC Raiders, zombies feel like an obvious, natural fit that haven’t really seen much representation in the genre.
However, The Midnight Walkers is definitely an Early Access title, having come out just a few days ago, and even just spending a few hours with it makes this fairly obvious. Long matchmaking times are the first red flag, but they’re far from the only rough edge.
The closest point of comparison is Dark and Darker, and The Midnight Walkers borrows a lot from its risk-reward loop. The general loop is similar, with you setting out to scavenge for loot while trying to deal with NPC-controlled enemies as well as other players in the area. The ultimate goal is to make it back to base with all of your spoils. However, the modern-day setting also helps it to differentiate itself from Dark and Darker thanks to the prevalence of guns, and ranged combat generally being a lot more viable than it was in the dark fantasy dungeon crawling extraction game. The general goal is also largely the same: gain power by getting your hands on better equipment that you can craft from materials you find during raids.
There’s also a class system, which allows you to better refine your playstyle. Lockdown, for instance, is focused on long-distance combat with a bow. Brick, on the other hand, is a lot more comfortable in melee combat. Along with general playstyle, these classes also define your general progression through their own skill trees, as well as the kinds of gear you can equip. The Crow is better off with light armor for sneaking around in, for instance, while Brick will need the heaviest armor they can find.
"The closest point of comparison is Dark and Darker, and The Midnight Walkers borrows a lot from its risk-reward loop."
The zombies also represent a great foundation for what will likely end up being a large variety of enemies. We already have different zombie types to deal with, from the slow-moving walker that can overwhelm you with sheer numbers, to more dangerous ones like spitters that can attack you from a distance or runners that won’t stop chasing you down. Taking these zombies down also tends to be quite enjoyable; combat feels heavy and impactful, especially when you’re using melee weapons.Ranged options also offer plenty of utility—bows can fire different arrow types, while shotguns can tear through small groups of zombies with ease. Most of the zombies are also quite good about telegraphing their attacks, making defensive play simple enough.
Ultimately, the toughest part of combat is when you encounter other players. Unlike, say ARC Raiders, you’re encouraged to either hide from other players, or engage them in combat. Ad-hoc co-operation with other squads doesn’t really offer any benefits in The Midnight Walkers, since there aren’t big boss fights that various squads can team up to take on. The player base has also proven itself to be surprisingly aggressive already, and it can be quite challenging as a new player to escape with your loot once you’ve been spotted by another player that is even remotely better equipped than you. Dying during a raid means you lose all of your progress, which also inadvertently encourages a more conservative style of gameplay, since taking a big risk will often be met with heavy punishment.
The extraction mechanics also create a major barrier for players who might be more keen on co-operating with others, or even just simply play as a pre-made group. Escape pods can only extract a single person, which means squads have to secure multiple pods, or use escape codes to open other pods, before committing to an exit. That added friction increases risk, because the longer you stay in the building, the more likely you are to run into other players.
"The extraction mechanics also create a major barrier for players who might be more keen on co-operating with others, or even just simply play as a pre-made group."
Visually, The Midnight Walkers isn’t a particularly good looking game. Aside from muddy textures on several surfaces and characters, the title also suffers from some poor art direction at times. The Liberty Grand Center’s floors often feel unnecessarily convoluted, and while this might be fine in the beginning, the lack of any memorable landmarks, or even just a horizon to look at, makes navigation tough even after you’ve spent several hours with the game. While the poison gas constantly spreading throughout the levels offers some reprieve from this thanks to the map getting smaller, you are also encouraged to hop over to another floor of the Mega-Complex, bringing with it an entirely new difficult-to-navigate area.
Thankfully, it doesn’t suffer from poor performance. Running it on an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of RAM and a Radeon RX 7800 XT, I was able to maintain high frame rates throughout my time with the game, with most of the visual settings cranked to the max at 1440p. Aside from a few small hitches here and there, I never had any technical issues with the game, and the hitches were likely caused by shader compilation happening in the background, since they essentially disappeared after a few minutes of play.
Audio, on the other hand, is largely fine. There aren’t any serious issues here, and you won’t have zombies or other players sneaking up on you just due to technical issues with the sound. It’s easy to tell when a room still has zombies shuffling around thanks to their loud groans, and even attacks sound heavy and meaty.
"Aside from muddy textures on several surfaces and characters, the title also suffers from some poor art direction at times."
The networking and matchmaking has been largely fine. However, the extraction shooter seems to suffer quite a bit from low player counts, since it can often take several minutes just to get into a raid. Once you’re in, however, things go smoothly, and lag hasn’t really felt like a real issue in my time with the game.
In its current state, The Midnight Walkers also feels quite repetitive. Once you’ve gotten your hands on some decent enough gear, there just isn’t much incentive to keep playing, at least for the time being. Oneway Ticket Studio will undoubtedly release more content for the extraction shooter down the line, but in the meantime, you might be better off just picking one of the several other games in the genre.
The biggest issues with the game right now come down to balance. It has already been out for a few days, and in that time, several players have already managed to get their hands on incredible equipment. This makes interacting with others essentially pointless, since you’re just going to end up dying. The title also suffers from a lack of big PvE encounters that might force the playerbase to co-operate with each other, as well as its solo player-focused extraction mechanics. All of this, along with the lack of much in the way of long-term goals makes The Midnight Walkers a difficult extraction shooter to recommend right now.
This game was reviewed on PC.
