Late Night 1320

STAY FAR AWAY!! Its been like 5 years and I still feel bad about wasting money on this game that was abandoned not long after I bought it.

If you like errors, glitches, bad graphics, drag racing and shitty cars then buy Street Legal Racing Redline, that one even has mod support, 1320 sucks, and its a abandoned game

The ‘Check Engine’ light is on.

Late Night 1320 is a street drag-racing game still in Early Access as of this review’s publishing. With the last updates and social media posts by the developers in 2019, has this title jumped the light and been disqualified?

Well, it certainly doesn’t look too hot. Even on the highest graphical preset from the barebones options menu, this game is visually unimpressive for the most part. Environments are devoid of interesting items such as spectators or traffic, grass is plainly two-dimensional, and lighting is basic with no dynamic shadows. The car models themselves look alright, but they have no damage modelling outside of ugly bump mapping to make the panels look wrinkled or dented. For unknown reasons, motion blur is really only visible in one race location; it’s absent or very subdued otherwise… not like ghost-like afterimages resemble anything approaching quality blur. Nor does the excessive screen shake meaningfully improve the sense of speed, just the sense of nausea.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2598350246

On the performance and stability fronts, my Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, 1070Ti, Windows 10 system encountered no problems playing the game at 1440p and a constant 60 frames per second. Mind that the already-unattractive menu interface is entirely mouse driven with no option to use a gamepad or keyboard to navigate. As for bugs, they range from occasionally corrupted text to sound bugs; mildly annoying, but nothing game breaking.

And rounding out the presentation, the audio also leaves to be desired. There are only two distinct musical tracks in the game. Winning a race provides you with a rather neat rock solo that is unfortunately cut off by the replays loading a few seconds later. The other track, a somewhat tense synth/techno piece present in most menus, is incredibly repetitive and has obnoxious engine rev noises on top. Car sounds are decent but still lack in variety; two flavours of V8 noise aren't enough. Forced induction has no variation between the two types available, so superchargers whistle instead of whine (boooo...), but at least nitrous jetting is appropriately punchy.

Before one engages in the dangerous activity that is racing, there is an introductory story resembling a choose-your-own-adventure. While initially intriguing, none of the choices will impact the outcome: your character’s down to their last assets and must increase their reputation and car performance to get back at the rival gang.

Next, you scour the junkyard for any old car to race in. Word of advice: don’t take something that’s missing an engine or wheels. Your starting funds simply cannot cover those expenses, even if the bare chassis is cheaper. Any leftover money should be spent on upgrades, the catalogue for which is awkwardly sorted. There’s no way to “bookmark” or otherwise tell if you already have parts installed without juggling between the garage and shop screens.

And now, finally, it is time to get to the meat and potatoes of the game. You earn money and respect by winning races. The only races you ever do are quarter-mile drag, and there’s no meaningful variation in how you approach the races nor how you strategize. You’re just put on the starting line, launch when the lights go green on the display (since the physical lights don't work), and hopefully you have the traction, power and shifting points to cross the line before the other racer. Rinse and repeat… for-freaking-ever.

Progression in racing games is often tied to gathering enough cash to upgrade, but the grind is absolutely obnoxious in Late Night 1320. The juicy upgrades that you really care about cost over a grand each. Your early rewards barely crack $100 and some reputation for the underbaked respect system. Repeated races provide even fewer rewards. Opponents spike in difficulty regularly and their “estimated times” flat out lie to you. Add all of this up and you’re in for quite the boring experience, beating the same prat over and over for mere scraps.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2598201972

This turns even more obnoxious when factoring the limited maintenance elements for your cars. Engine oil lasts forever and is fairly cheap to replace, but any amount adds up in the long run. Meanwhile, nitrous systems have limited repairs (making for an expensive investment eventually) and the top-of-the-line upgrade costs more to refill than half of the races ever give out when replayed.

The actual repair system, proudly touted on the main menu screen, is basically non-existent as you never have to worry about your car wearing down, even if you go into the run-off area or crash into an invisible wall. Your supercharged thousand-plus horsepower monster won’t mind the crusty stock radiators.

This title’s premise is such a wonderful opportunity to capitalize on car culture and it makes some uneasy steps towards that goal with some customization and upgrade options, such as two-step systems which keep the car’s revs at the optimum point before launching. But there is nothing more beyond this tiny glimpse of what could have been. There are no spectators, no wheelies, no pre-race staging or burnout phases, no pink slips or betting, not even any cruising through the world.

Even limiting oneself to just the drag racing, the available content is highly limited. Whatever is there to unlock is most likely not worth playing to unlock or buy. The only place you buy cars from is the junkyard, so they’re always in a state of disrepair. You have the choice of five different models, except a few are so similar in design that they may as well be duplicates – the number of unique designs is closer to three.

Body customization involves sticking on bits of trim or a “special roof” that one needs to squint to see even a small difference on most cars. Paint resprays are entirely overwritten by the eight choices of preset decal kits. Sigh. What if I want a lime green car with flame decals? To top it off, most of the “chassis” parts make no meaningful difference to the car’s characteristics.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2598210446

And lastly, the menus are as ugly as they are functionally destitute. Aside from such quality typos as “I’m not taking this serious”, racer portraits shuffle around every time you access the race location. Want to grind some punk for cash? Whoops, muscle memory made you race against someone out of your league. You can’t quit out of races, nor can you quickly restart them. You can only either finish them or be disqualified for a pitiful respect loss.

The rival gang you’re introduced to at the start, “The Chains”, has only one racer programmed in. You encounter him even in locations where his car is woefully ill-equipped to compete against the other generic opponents. This means that every time you race this guy again, your car will effortlessly finish with a good five seconds to spare.

The closest one can get to finishing the game is beating every racer in the existing locations. That amounts to three-to-four hours of gameplay, which is on the low side even for a racing game. There’s minimal functional variation in gameplay, and most of the time spent reaching that point is just dull grinding in order to progress to the next racer. “Quick race” just pits your existing ride against an opponent that cannot match you. Any fun to be had competing is just shattered by the tedium.

Such a shame.

Abandoned and left to rot like a forgotten project car, Late Night 1320 is an unfulfilling and repetitive racer, lacking even the most basic quality of life and progression features.

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i wonder if this game is still active. does not seem to update. has some options down.

Its a good game tho having the boss as the same for all the street race groups and all the cars are white that you race against. I've seen other peoples comments and I know there bad but just try hard enough to beat the game and one more thing, some games can take awhile to add another update for new graphics or cars or levels and many other things to. So I think this is a good game to play my opinion. So there you go.

im soon getting a refund for this game.
don't want to play it.
don't want to look at it.
its bad.
real bad.

So! I am always waiting for a functional drag racing game, as there have only been a couple including NFS Pro Street way back in the day. Now, this brings me back to the first good drag racing game I ever played, Hot Rod Magazines "Hot Rod American Street Drag" which came out in 2003 for windows 95. Not only does that game made for windows 95 word better than this, (1320 crashed on me twice in an hour) it also had a functional save mechanic you could control, the vehicles actually responded to input, and to be honest the graphics were not much worse back then. 1320 also stole a significant amount of assets from American Street drag including all of the art assets for vehicle parts in the shop, and somehow packages this in a worse combination than a game made by a car magazine before many people reading this review were born. All in all, this is the worst 9 dollars I think I have spent since the last time I got food poisoning from a food truck.

this game is fun.. sort of. Super hard to make money because every race you get around $50 but it costs $150 to refill the nitrous bottle so you eventually go broke and cant play the game anymore. change the money you get from races a lot and it will make the game more playable.

I spent money on this.

I am disappointed in myself for doing so.

I understand that it takes a rather considerable amount of work to create a game... But there's an easier way! Take a game from 2003, chuck a few new models at it, and call it good! Oh, and let's add what appear to be pay-to-progress mechanics just to turn the screws a bit harder.

Hard pass. Admittedly, I looked at this game, saw that it had a lot of similarities to Hot Rod: American Street Drag, and went "ooh, that but new would be really cool"... But I didn't entirely expect it to very literally /be/ ASD except with content missing from the reskin (and some assets still stolen from ASD), and that deserves no praise whatsoever.

This game could be a fun and casual indie drag racing arcade game, however, it's still in development, suffers from a multitude of issues, and hasn't been updated in 5 months. If this game was completed and balanced, it would be worth buying. I initially bought this expecting more frequent updates, but since it's been stagnant for so long, I wouldn't recommend getting it in it's current state.

Early Access Review.....this review is subject to change as another update occurs and when the developer responds regarding game status/next updates.

You can only play a portion of the game so far. Much of the game progress is locked. The developer hasn't updated or responded to Steam comments for roughly 2 months. It appears that they also haven't been active on their social media pages for roughly 2 months. I like the game and it has potential. Even though you can only play a small portion it is fun.

Please note that currently garage progress and drag strip is locked out. Many people are buying the game wondering why they can't get to the next garage.

Hope the developer keeps up the great work they started. I am only posting this negative review as i see some concerns on social feeds that indicate support for the game is poor. I am all for supporting creative indie titles and small teams; hope the developer is continuing to work on this title.

UPDATE ALMOST A YEAR LATER! DO NOT PURCHASE THEY DO NOT INTEND TO UPDATE STAY AWAY!



BARE BONES GAMEPLAY!! DO NOT EXPECT A BUILT GAME VERY EARLY STAGE

- PROS -
Mechanics and idealoigy of the game are beautiful! I'd love to see 4 cylinders and 6 cylinders with each block having a diff sound and some serious turbo spool sounds!

- CONS -
Bare bones!

I think this game is pretty okay for what it is but since the devs have gone silent. I can't recommend this game.

Pros:
Car Upgrades (most of them)
Track Design.
The Cars themselves.
Decals

Cons:
Very little money after winning a race.
Very little to do in the game.
Nos refill system is annoying.
Can't buy garages.
Engine tuning sliders do nothing.


If you want a game like this but a whole lot better and cheaper, search for "Street Legal Racing Redline" on steam.

you do fine in country road secction, then after that you start running nitrous cars, which you wont be able to afford to keep up with the AI spraying 200 shot, because nitrous is linked to durability, and durability to quantity of nitrous, so once you spray the bottle you have to buy a new one. the AI will spray 200 shot all day, and you'll eventually stop getting sufficient money grinding country races. GG, this one thing makes the entire game unbelievably shit, which is sad because i do enjoy it.

This game is actually a lot of fun! Please ignore the Naysayers and support these guys, as they have the passion and commitment to do so much more with this game. These days I really don't understand what some people want in a game, particularly when it costs less than a meal!!!
One guy slammed this game and then they released a major update addressing a lot of issues and even adding more locations and content. Obviously the physics are not meant to be realistic as this would then take away from the accessibility of the game and it would lose a lot of its appeal. I think the easy relaxed feel is what makes it more enjoyable. If I wanted a realistic racer, I would play Project Cars 2.

The game was never released as a sim, so I don't know why people try to compare to real life. I don't know that much about cars, but I have played a ton of car racing games and this is definitely far from the worse of its genre.

If you are looking for a polished game with AAA graphics then look elsewhere because the game is for people who like cutting and pasting different parts into sleeper cars and letting them roar on the tarmac.

SIMPLE MINDLESS FUN THAT'S ALL!

i have to admit at the moment the game is fairly short, as i finished what it has to do at the moment with in about a hour and a half. once the full game comes out im keen to replay it and ill play it at each update too.

the only changes that i think need to be made are that the money needs to not be random amounts won, first time you vs a new racer its a set amount then if you want to re race them you bet on the race or have a drag track where you bet on the races. because i think the money grind in this game is a bit of a pain in the ass, when some of the slower racers give you 600 and the faster guys give you 150

If you liked Hot Rod American Street Drag (old early 2000's game) you will like this pretty much exactly the same just different cars and a little bit of a story line other then that pretty much the same

This game is a perfect example of an arcade/realistic drag simulation. there are tons parts that can be put on the vehicle to increase value and or performance. I would like to see a 4 cylinder career option in the future of you guys want to do that. its definitely unique to the hot rod type games but way more beautiful. you need to add more cars since it would give a vast amount of replayability in the game. Worth the money and i can tell there is lots of love being put into this project!

This game needs a lot of work but is still interesting to set down and mess with. The parts menu is straight out of an older drag racing game called Hot Rod American Street Drag, which was a very fun drag racing game for me. I love being able to throw whatever motor I want into any car I own, gives me a great pleasure to make sleeper cars. I hope this game goes far because I played the old Hot Rod Drag games for hours and was a huge fan of Motor City Online in my younger days, the freedom of being able to build your car the way you want to build it keeps me playing these games. This game is in early access state and has many bugs as of right now but is playable. Your car starts out as a junk pile with tires so its not going to handle or shift gears like an enzo or anything at first so give it time buy some upgrades and you will find yourself sitting in a rumbling beast eventually. If you want to know what this game could turn out to be like look into the Hot Rod games that came out around 2003. I think the $10-$15 price tag is fair for what it is, their are worse games for higher prices, hope they stick with this one and make it even better than I expect it to be. For now ill be happy to just have a new drag racing game where I am not restricted to use certain parts on certain cars.

i love drag racing, so i buy every game that has drag racing in it

i ran across this the day after it came out, and yea its pretty brutal in its current state, ya there's drag racing but, it has alot of little problems which im sure will be fixed in the future being a early access game

main problem i had was AVG freaking out and thinking the game was malware, which took a minute to straighten out

some smaller issues include
GI issues *scaling is weird, popup info windows opening off or half off screen*
graphical issues in game *road disappearing and clipping*
cars control pretty horribly
clutch. tach and speedo seem not to work correctly


and the storyline.......wow.....pretty bad lol

at this time i wouldnt not suggest the game, i think they shoulda waited a bit long to go early access, but there is potential and i will be coming back to the game for sure.