Hands‑on impressions of The Midnight Walkers in Steam Early Access, breaking down its zombie‑filled tower map, extraction shooter foundations, brutal risk/reward loop, and how it stacks up to Escape from Tarkov and Arc Raiders at launch.
A new kind of extraction nightmare
The Midnight Walkers is not trying to reinvent extraction shooters from the ground up. Instead it slices a very specific fantasy out of the genre: what if Escape from Tarkov’s tension and risk lived entirely inside one cursed high‑rise, every stairwell echoing with the sound of zombies and desperate players?
Now in Steam Early Access, Oneway Ticket Studio’s PvPvE zombie shooter feels like a deliberate answer to sprawling maps and slow burn raids. The Midnight Walkers is compact, violent, and obsessed with melee. It is also rough, intermittently janky, and still searching for its long‑term meta. But there is already enough here to make it stand out from the Tarkov‑likes it is chasing.
One tower, a hundred ways to die
Everything in The Midnight Walkers happens inside Liberty Grand Center, a single mega tower you will come to know as both playground and prison. Instead of rotating between forests, factories, and shoreline towns, every raid is a different slice of the same building.
Floors are distinct enough that you quickly build a mental map. One run might start you in the neon‑lit bar district packed with breakable furniture and tight booths that favor heavy melee swings. Another pushes you through a garish casino floor where line of sight stretches across slot machine aisles, suddenly making that underpowered pistol feel worth the inventory slot. Higher up, broadcast rooms, office corridors, and a multi‑level parking structure change how noise carries and where ambushes feel natural.
Verticality does a lot of heavy lifting. Elevators and stairwells are the arteries of the building, and every decision to go up or down carries risk. Elevators are fast but loud and predictable. Stairs are quieter, but every turn of the landing hides the possibility of a zombie pack or a squad holding an angle. You are rarely more than a few rooms away from something that can end your run.
The tower itself fights back. As time passes, floors randomly begin to fill with toxic gas that chips away at your health, forcing you to abandon otherwise strong positions and choke points. Routes that felt safe ten minutes ago become lethal dead ends, driving players closer together and funneling them toward remaining safe floors and extraction sites. It is a smart way to shrink the play space without copying the familiar closing circles of battle royale games.
A melee‑first extraction shooter
On paper The Midnight Walkers follows the Tarkov playbook. You drop in with a kit, scavenge for weapons and valuables, manage injury and resources, then gamble everything on reaching an extraction point. If you die, your gear and most of your loot stay in the tower. If you live, you pump that value into better equipment, crafting, and your long‑term progression.
In practice it feels very different because almost everything is built to push you into melee. Where Tarkov and Arc Raiders lean heavily on careful gunplay and ranged duels, The Midnight Walkers treats firearms as loud, precious tools you use sparingly. Pistols and bows exist, but ammo is intentionally rare enough that you hesitate before pulling the trigger. Every shot is an announcement to other players.
Most of your time is spent with something sharp or blunt in your hands. Bats, machetes, pipes, and improvised hatchets form the core of your kit. Swing arcs and attack timing matter, especially when you are surrounded. A missed heavy swing that slams into a wall or table leaves you open for a couple of punishing seconds. Stamina management, spacing, and target priority keep even routine zombie packs slightly stressful.
The payoff is that basic zombie encounters feel tactile and crunchy in a way that many extraction shooters simply do not attempt. You are not just trading shots at distant silhouettes; you are physically carving through a crowd to reach the next hallway. When another squad appears, the clash of melee builds a chaos that is closer to a horror brawler than a milsim.
This comes with caveats. Hit registration and collision can feel inconsistent at times, especially during three way scraps where animations and zombies overlap. Early Access builds also show some stiffness in movement, so dodging or repositioning in tight spaces is not as fluid as the design clearly wants it to be. The intent is obvious and compelling, but it needs tuning to reach the kind of reliability melee combat demands.
Classes, squads, and fragile identities
To give runs some structure beyond your gear, The Midnight Walkers launches with four broad archetypes that lean into different parts of the kit. One pushes raw melee damage and survivability, another focuses on mobility, a third gives you better tools for ranged play, and a fourth tips into support and healing.
Right now, those roles are more about soft identity than hard composition requirements. This is not a game where your squad composition locks you out of content, but a more mobile teammate can safely kite a zombie horde, while a melee specialist can hold the front line during a noisy extraction countdown. The ranged‑leaning class makes better use of scarce bullets and weapon handling, and the support focused character can salvage a failing push with strong healing or buffs.
These classes feel like scaffolding for a deeper system that has not fully arrived. Perks and passives are present but basic, and there is not yet the same sense of character‑defining builds you get from more mature extraction titles. On the upside, the simplicity keeps onboarding quick. New players can understand their role in minutes and spend more time learning the tower than reading tooltips.
The risk and reward of one building
All the extraction shooter hallmarks are here. You spawn in with a loadout that lives or dies with you. Every corpse and crate is a mystery box of potential profit. Medical supplies, crafting materials, and rare weapons pile into your backpack until you start asking the genre’s eternal question: do I push for one more room or bank what I have?
What makes The Midnight Walkers interesting is how compressed that risk curve feels inside a single building. You are never more than a floor or two away from an extraction zone that might be active, but you are also never far from another team that wants the same exit. Matches are shorter and more focused than the multi‑zone slogs extraction fans might be used to. That makes each decision starker. Leaving after a quick, quiet haul feels almost cowardly when you know the casino floor below still holds unopened safes.
Gas storms act as the game’s invisible hand. When a floor starts to poison, loot you left behind becomes unreachable, and alternate routes get cut off. More players end up funneled toward whichever extractions are still accessible. The late stages of a raid tend to be a collision of desperate, half‑injured squads all crashing around the same staircase.
Extraction itself is not a simple door at the edge of the map. You hunt for extraction pods using a handheld scanner, then trigger a noisy unlocking sequence that forces your team to hold the area for a tense window. Zombies converge, drawn by sound. So do other players. Failing in that final minute and watching your backpack’s contents evaporate is as punishing here as it is in Tarkov, but the arena is much tighter and more claustrophobic.
Outside of raids, there is a familiar loop of spending profits, upgrading your hideout, crafting consumables, and tuning your next loadout. At this stage, these systems are closer to functional framework than deep economy. Prices and drop rates still feel like they are searching for the sweet spot between stingy and generous. Expect a lot of tuning passes in the coming months.
How it stacks up to Escape from Tarkov and Arc Raiders
The Midnight Walkers lives in the same broad category as Escape from Tarkov and Arc Raiders, but it carves out a niche rather than going head to head on the same axes.
Compared to Tarkov, this is a narrower and more approachable experience. There is no huge map rotation, elaborate ammo simulation, or heavy military sim trappings. The punishment for death is similar you lose what you brought and what you found, aside from what insurance or safe slots protect but the journey to extraction is faster and more contained. You trade the dread of crossing half a forest for the panic of climbing three flights of blood slick stairs.
Gun nuts will likely still prefer Tarkov’s painstaking weapon modeling and the tactical pacing that comes with it. The Midnight Walkers instead focuses on visceral horror energy. When combat works, it feels more like a desperate last‑stand brawl in a zombie movie than a measured firefight between operators. That makes it a better fit for groups who want high stakes without spending hours on ballistics spreadsheets.
Arc Raiders sits in a slightly different space as a co op extraction shooter built around stylish sci fi firefights and open environments. The Midnight Walkers is much grimmer, more grounded, and more claustrophobic. Instead of scanning open valleys for patrols, you are listening for footsteps on the floor above you. Instead of battling towering mechanical bosses, you are trying not to get torn apart in a stairwell while another squad watches from the balcony.
Where Arc Raiders leans heavily on spectacle and co op PvE objectives, The Midnight Walkers keeps its focus squarely on intimate encounters. Even with squads, it keeps pushing players into knife range of each other. That makes its highs and lows swingier. A clean extraction after cutting through another team at arm’s length feels incredible. A sudden desync or melee whiff that costs you the run feels disproportionately brutal.
Early Access rough edges
As a launch‑state Early Access game, The Midnight Walkers carries all the caveats you would expect. Performance is inconsistent across hardware, with some players reporting frame drops on the busier floors of the tower and others dealing with stuttering during hectic extraction fights. Network stability is improving, but rubber banding and occasional lag spikes can be the difference between a heroic clutch and an inexplicable death.
Content breadth is also clearly in its first phase. Liberty Grand Center is a strong centerpiece, but right now that one tower has to carry the entire experience. Variants, events, and new enemy types would go a long way to keeping raids fresh for hundreds of hours. Likewise, class progression, crafting depth, and long term account goals feel more like outlines than finished systems.
On the other hand, the fundamentals of the loop already work. The tower is memorable, the gas system keeps matches moving, and the melee first combat gives it a personality that sets it apart from its peers. When a raid comes together, when you and your squad quietly climb through a darkened office floor, ambush another team at an elevator, then barely hold the extraction pod while zombies slam through barricades, it clicks.
Verdict: Worth watching, maybe worth bleeding for
The Midnight Walkers is not ready to unseat Escape from Tarkov or outshine Arc Raiders in raw spectacle, but it does not need to. Its single tower setting, commitment to PvPvE chaos, and focus on brutal melee combat create a flavor of extraction that no one else is offering right now.
If you love the idea of high risk raids but bounced off Tarkov’s complexity, this could be the more immediate, horror driven alternative you were waiting for, provided you are willing to tolerate technical issues and mechanical roughness while it grows. For hardened extraction veterans, it is an intriguing side project with a very different rhythm and a lot of potential, especially if future updates deepen the class system and expand what Liberty Grand Center can throw at you.
Right now, The Midnight Walkers is exactly what Early Access is supposed to be: a strong core idea that is playable, fun, and flawed, just waiting for enough patches, balance passes, and new content drops to turn this tower of the dead into a place extraction fans never want to leave.