Midnight Heist Preview

Midnight Heist is a first-person horror stealth game developed and published by MeditaTale, an indie studio. In it, you get to play as one of four characters — unfortunately, though, none of them are very interesting — and your job is to hack and steal data from various companies around the location of the game, Midnight City. 

The game has a basic story, but it’s rather boring. There are three different factions that each give you their own quests. With these, there is some text you can read that reveals a little about them, and honestly, it’s bad. Lines like, “Betray us and you will deeply regret it” are very common in the game, and they feel really stupid. Overall, the writing feels like it was an afterthought, which is a shame, as it could have been a much more enjoyable game if the story had been better.

Midnight Heist’s gameplay is interesting and has a good idea behind it, but it isn’t implemented well at all. It’s a combination of the survival horror present in Phasmophobia or Deceit and the stealth mechanics in Payday 2. You need to break into a certain building and hack into computers while also stealing anything valuable you can find. There is a creature roaming around the level, though, and if it catches you, it’s game over. While it sounds good on paper, there are a few problems with this. The gameplay is very simple, and there aren’t a lot of possible approaches to levels. The design of each area is really boring, and there aren’t a lot of unique things about each office the game takes place in. The most notable issue, though, is that most of the time, the horror aspect isn’t even there. It’s really easy to complete entire levels without encountering enemies at all, and just to check, I wanted to see if I could beat a level while just running around hacking the different computers — and I could. There is a shop that can be used to buy cosmetics for your character with in-game money, but it’s not user-friendly at all and isn’t really enticing. The co-op mode is the best thing this experience has to offer, and it is pretty fun to play it with friends, but it still suffers from the variety of problems the gameplay has, and the only reason it’s fun is because you play with friends.

The game looks fine, although the textures are not really detailed — looking at anything closely makes it really blurry and pixelated. Models look good, except for the player model, though you play in first-person, so you won’t really see it at all, and there isn’t anything that stands out for being bad. There are some weird animations, but nothing that would really bother anyone, and most animations are great. For an indie, the graphics in this game are really impressive.

There are a few sound effects found throughout the experience, and they’re really good. The sounds for hacking devices or taking pictures, while not being very unique, are still really nice to hear. There aren’t really any bad SFX in the game. This, however, is not the case with the voice acting, unfortunately. There are people speaking to you at the beginning of every level, and they sound awful. The quality of the effects on the voice and the way the lines are delivered are both terrible and felt really out of place.

All in all, Midnight Heist isn’t very impressive. Most of the things in it are either not unique or bad, except the basic idea for it. I do think something based on the core gameplay could potentially be great, but the production for this wasn’t very good. It doesn’t cost a lot, though, and is still in Early Access, so if anyone likes Payday 2 and Phasmophobia separately and wants to give it a try, I wouldn’t say not to for only £8.50.