Thanks to Petite Games for the review code

Title: Midnight 2
System: Wii U (eShop)
Price: $1.99
Release date: 05/05/2016

The main game/story

In all honesty, this game has zero story. Nothing in the manual or in game to even explain what the heck you’re supposed to be doing, but from the tiny bit I gathered from the eShop description, it seems the main goal is to guide the cube named Midnight to his destination by shooting her towards the holes in each stage. Despite the “2” in the title, there seems to be very little difference between the original title and this game, so there’s no need to rush to pick up the original if you decide to jump in with this game first.

Graphics

The artstyle is unaltered from the original Midnight, but since the original game had nothing but a serene, moonlight background with very visible objects, that’s not really a bad thing. Don’t fix what isn’t broken as they say. Just like before, the menu is simple to access and the game is easy to look at due to the limited use of colors, but it still makes me at least wish they changed the look of the menu up in some way.

Music and Sound

One thing is for certain, and thats the fact that Midnight 2 is obsessed with Pianos, just like the original! In fact, the songs seem to be the exact same melodies from the original game, which means that you’ll unfortunately be hearing a lot of crazy piano strikes when you die, and never-ending melodramatic piano playing when you’re going through the levels. It honestly gives the game the impression that it was never meant to be a sequel at all, and instead a simple update.

Gameplay

Just like the original Midnight, the main goal of the game is to carefully use the powers of physics to shoot your way to the end destination. The fewer shots you take, the more stars you get, with the max being three. There are 28 levels, with each new one progressing in terms of difficulty and challenge… And honestly, I pretty much explained everything Midnight is about as well, since there’s pretty much nothing to make the sequel stand out from the original outside of more levels. Sure, the levels included are still creative and fun to play, but they just feel like a blatant level pack split off into its own game. Once I got the hang of the controls, I went through the majority of the levels in just under 45 minutes, only to hit a road block when the last few levels became so tough that it took tons of tries before I gave up on them. They aren’t impossible levels by any means, and the difficulty does indeed scale fairly to get to the hard levels I ran into, but with the lack of any skip level feature it’s hard to feel motivated to come back to it later when you literally have no other choice but to beat it before moving onto more levels. Of course it’s understandable to go back to the older levels to get the three stars from every stage (since by the end of the game just getting one is a challenge), but the inability to simply skip past a tough level seems like a missed oversight, especially when Midnight 1 had this issue as well.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this is by far one of the worst “sequels” to a game that I’ve ever played, simply because it feels nothing like a sequel and instead everything like what should have been a DLC add-on to the original Midnight. That being said, the gameplay is still a solid good time that’ll give you your money’s worth if you go for three stars in every level, but outside of that there’s really not much to talk about regarding this game. If you liked the original Midnight, then this expansion pack should be right up your alley with more of the same. To newcomers hoping that the second game would be the best due to more crazy new features, don’t get your hopes up, but instead start with the first game and move to this one once you 100% Midnight 1 so you can enjoy more levels. Hopefully if there’s ever a Midnight 3 it’ll either change things up quite a bit or be a form of a DLC add on to this title. Nevertheless, I still had some fun with Midnight 2, and can safely say it’s far from a waste of $2. If you like physics based puzzle games, go for both of them I say, since there’s really not many differences between the two and they won’t break the bank. I give Midnight 2 a 7 out of 10.