A game that is poised to begin a renaissance of old school-style racers, even if the road ahead is long, winding and difficult. Welcome to Japan, sometime between 1990 and the late 00's. NIGHT-RUNNERS could be considered a "best-of" compilation of gameplay and aesthetics from cult classic racing games.

NOTICE: Frequent updates bring additional features, user friendliness, balance passes and generally smooth out the experience. This review will be occasionally updated as time passes.

Grungy, slightly-worn VHS and DVD aesthetics. Film grain, chromatic aberration, vignetting and other digital imperfections are on full display. Combined with the darkness of playing only at night time, it sounds like there’s too much for the eyes. For many people, this may very well be the case; changing ingame settings like removing camera noise helps a lot, as does increasing the brightness. But for those who can stomach it, the presentation is nothing short of stellar. It could also be done to mask the lower-detail textures, models, animations, but that’s not really a complaint from me. Just know that clarity could very well be problematic at such "uncommon" occurrences as blazing down the highway at Vmax.

Complementing the visuals is the soundtrack. Here we have a surprisingly varied mix of EDM: house, electronica, drum-and-bass, and probably more. It’s something special when I enabled, and left enabled, the option to dynamically adjust music volume based on how I drive the car. Nothing says underground street racing like this soundtrack collection, even if it’s a little limited. Otherwise, car audio is passable but weirdly pitched while driving, and the variety of sound effects is rather limited.

Some people have reported program crashes and instability when trying to run the game in its early form. This is something to keep in mind, even though I report no problems starting and playing. A Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RTX 3070, Windows 10 64bit system is comfortably overkill for this game, at 1440p 60fps, with all graphics settings cranked to the highest. Controls can be rebound across keyboard or gamepad, though function keys cannot be assigned to.

Your unseen player avatar arrives in Japan as a total zero. With what little money is available, you have to buy a car from a used vehicle auction – which is realized remarkably authentic, and probably a little sinister. Choose wisely, as cars with too many problems will make things even more difficult down the line. You’re then loaned some money, and off you go to race. Crews fight for territory and influence, something that becomes apparent in the late game.

A standard premise for a racing game, but it hardly needs any more elaboration, honestly.

Right after starting out in NIGHT-RUNNERS, one may realize the cars are slow. Perhaps a little too slow. They take over 10 seconds to accelerate to 100km/h, buzzing like angry hornets all the while. Things naturally get better over time, though you still can't quite crack 4 seconds to the triple digits, no matter the upgrades. Steering is slow, and grip is a little inconsistent. A ridiculously strong sense of speed alleviates some of this: the edges of the screen blur, the field of view widens massively, and the camera shakes like your ride’s going to rattle itself apart. It’s all artificial at low speeds, but becomes more than justified when horsepower soars beyond 500. Alternate camera and view settings can also tone down the visual feedback and noise… but, personally, it's so exhilarating that I cannot say "no".

The only real way to make money is by challenging racers from the only available hub, “Tatsumi PA”. The GPS arrow is still useless, but GPS routes and easy fast travel make this a non-issue, on top of a familiar route to take each time. Once finally at the hub, players walk to the other racers’ cars, and call them to wager their money. Your debt money acts as a safety net, but can only be used for betting, which can cut into your profits and bottleneck you.

All races are point-to-point sprints down the Shutoku Expressway. Event and route variety are quite limited, with players potentially seeing the same races a few times per night. It's not a stretch to say one will race across the same stretches of highway hundreds of times, if they play long enough. A small portion of races include tyre warmup (with no indication of what’s hot or cold), but otherwise plays out the same. In either case, hopefully you don't jump the start... in fact, you can stay a few seconds at the starting point, because the early AI is quite hilariously slow. Even the tougher opponents from the lategame, on the highest difficulty, pull their punches and wait for you to catch up. Your car also can attain much higher speeds than them. All of this is a far cry from the release version, where the racers were nigh-unbeatable outside of cheese.

Sometimes opponents may crash into the nearly-invincible mass traffic cars (or you do). Sometimes the other drivers just fall through the map and despawn. Growing pains, one hopes.

Reputation allows you to challenge progressively more lucrative, but faster racers. There's a possibility of soft-locking if you're not prepared: forced boss races may prevent you from grinding lower grade rivals to be able to improve your car enough. On the other hand, winning races adds a multiplier to subsequent wins, so NIGHT-RUNNERS has a tough time balancing the lose-more/win-more phenomenon.

Your time for racing is limited, especially as you have to be mindful of overheating, so eventually you’ll be sent back to the garage. This time is best spent tending to the car and upgrading it. While the upgrade system itself is really solid, navigating the menus is cumbersome. There’s no UI indication for parts you have equipped or in storage, and sometimes the 3D text is partly obscured by being off-screen. Swapping parts from storage is similarly awkward: select the system to work on, go into storage, select the part to change, walk over to the car, drop the part in, drop the swapped part back to storage, and repeat for every other thing to change.

Players race and build for the end goal (so far) of taking over the race crew at “Tatsumi PA” and making them even stronger. At the moment, the endgame elements of challenging other crews is either absent, broken, or so luck-based that it has yet to trigger in newer patches. You only have two cars to drive currently, and they're variations of the same model with differences too few and too minute to matter in the long run. Content on its own is pretty limited, and you'd be looking at some 4 hours, tops, before you explore basically everything on offer.

Not that I really mind, honestly.
The vibe is unlike any other.

NIGHT-RUNNERS screams for more content like a fire-breathing engine. Keep this one in your sights: this is illegal street racing like we've not seen in over a decade.

You meticulously plan and build your perfect ride. A humongous engine thunders beneath the bonnet, the chassis sitting low on the best tyres money can buy. Not two yards out of the garage, you fall through the ground and plummet forever into the abyss. Welcome to Street Legal Racing: Redline (henceforth shortened to SLRR).

Allow me to be nice for just a moment. This is one of the most unique and intricate racing games around because every major car component can be bought, installed, damaged and repaired individually. It’s a real struggle to begin your career in a lousy shoebox… but that just elevates the atmosphere. It’s terrifying to go full-blast in your machine, knowing an ill-fated traffic car or scenery object can mean total bankruptcy – yet it is necessary to prevail in the cut-throat street racing scene. Now that’s exhilarating!

Or, at least, if half of the game were up to snuff.

For you see, whenever there’s a brilliant idea waiting to be showcased, SLRR does its best to undermine it somehow. Driving, for example, is pretty weird – a red flag in a racing game. Steering has a sense of vagueness to it, compounded by the bouncy collisions and unpredictable road surface. If playing on keyboard, this is further exacerbated by the weird input curves for acceleration and braking. The cars always act like there’s at least a split-second delay between pressing or releasing throttle, and the car actually responding. Gamepad car controls are better, but literally every other function aside from straight up driving is unavailable then. In spite of all that, driving is probably the most functional core component of this title.

Anyway, your goal throughout career mode is to increase your reputation and bank account, rise through the ranks of the local street racing crews, and eventually win the “Race of Champions”. To this end, you can try to race roaming drivers during the day in point-to-point races, where you always pick the finish line. Very convenient, but doesn’t do enough to justify the pitiful money rewards here (and by the way, there’s no on-screen prompt to challenge to a race: you have to get really close and honk the idiots).

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094257048

The big bucks come from night races. Gather up to the randomly chosen race start - making sure to not get clotheslined by drivers racing for themselves – set up a bet, and participate in rather menial drag races… over and over again. Different starting locations do nothing to mask the fact that you have to race some 20 odd dudes, per crew, in order to progress. They don’t even follow a particular progression curve: more than once I competed against a tough opponent, win, and then face off against someone decidedly slower afterwards. Huh?


Ah yes, and when they cross the finish line, they act like their right pedal is stuck to the floor. They only make a token attempt to slow down when the race ends, as otherwise they careen into scenery and demolish their own cars. Pretty frequently they smashed up my rides too, leading to expensive repairs.

There’s an extremely fine line that the game tries to tread: on one hand, lose miserably and crash your car enough, and you might as well retire from street racing before the second night. But win a couple of back-to-back night races on maximum wagers, and you’re set to build up a good car from scratch, with funds to spare.

So, you manage just that, and go and buy some parts. You then discover that the parts catalog must be the single worst UI interface in the game. Everything is strewn throughout categories and on pages with no rhyme or reason. You have to cross-reference the parts in your inventory or on your car, remember where random items were strewn in various categories, and hope the purchased items actually fit anyway.

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094253253

Oh, I mentioned the parts catalog being garbage, but right beside it stands the actual garage screen. You have to hover your mouse on, or around, the part you want to remove or tune, and then hope you click at the exact time the name of the part flashes in the corner. Miss the timing, and you either spend another few seconds trying to take the thing off, or remove something else entirely – possibly damaging your car a bit in the process. Lovely.

Finally, you install the correct parts after figuring out what else was missing. You can then tune your car in a fairly in-depth way, going as far as the air-fuel ratio, shock stiffness, gearing and even your engine’s idle and rev limiter. Would be great if there were more varied aftermarket parts. Yes, if you buy a top spec car, your options to further upgrade are much more limited, save for wheels and tyres. Can’t swap engines either; you need an entirely new chassis for a new set of engine blocks.

Trudge through a couple more hours of night time racing and you’re cosmetically awarded with a different garage. It provides no meaningful difference to gameplay, save for acting as a different spawn point. Reach the top 5 racers of the final crew, and you can participate in the “Race of Champions”. It’s a one-lap loop around a highway and a few hilly bends, which you must repeat some 12 times before you finally win. Your reward is a snazzy supercar, one that’s honestly not that special in the event you were driving your own for the event.


In career mode, you can participate in special events on what must be race tracks ported from other games. The entry conditions are so incredibly specific, the payouts so meager, and the penalties so unfair that they’re not worthwhile. I’m not racing on Spa for 6 laps when it takes four instances of touching kerbs to disqualify me.

Multiplayer… doesn’t exist, five years after the last official update. Freeride and quick race just give you a random car to cruise with on a track, or race in the city. Replayability is limited to those who really want to build and stance cars. Workshop functionality mostly serves to add more parts and cars to play with.

https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094280550

This is an abysmally looking, sounding and performing game. Despite horrific pop-in, including mini-map icons, framerate is seldom at 60fps 1440p, on my Ryzen 9 3900X, RTX 3070, 64GB RAM, Windows 10 64bit system. No number of settings changed can remedy this; the most you might achieve is even worse visuals. Sound channels regularly glitch out as well. Even when sound doesn’t glitch, cars sound pretty poor. Some engine noises are borderline sensory abuse. The soundtrack is honestly okay, were it not extremely repetitive – only about a dozen total music tracks.

And that bit about falling through the floor? Not hyperbole, it’s happened repeatedly until I installed a Workshop addon specifically to prevent that. Hasn’t stopped the game from simply freezing and crashing to desktop repeatedly in my playthroughs. Save files can also corrupt at random. The game does make the odd extra save slots, for some reason.

Nevertheless, after some 10 hours of racing, I came out with one R.O.C. win and don’t exactly feel the need for more.

For everything Street Legal Racing: Redline attempts to do, it fails in at least two more places. A unique yet overly-ambitious racer, collapsing under its own weight.