As the previous reviewer suggests, Late Night is an excellent expansion pack in the sheer number of additions is makes to the base game, from the ability to adjust the height of wall objects to the elevators, to the musical instruments and bands, the bars, the vampires, and the celebrities, not to mention the highrise apartments.
However, there are several huge drawbacks many people probably wouldn't even consider when they take a look at Late Night's feature list. One of these is the inability, without cheats, to construct your own apartment/highrise structure, and due to the way they are built, you can't alter the inherent size of the building's floors - in fact, the only thing you can edit is the interior of the generic rooms you're given in the provided skyscrapers. Needless to say, this was quite an oversight, but I wouldn't put it past EA to add this functionality at a later date as I have a feeling I'm not the only one who was disappointed by this.
Another downside is the fact the new skyscrapers only house a single family. That's right, these buildings are utterly massive, and approaching an elevator will ask you what floor you want to go to, the 18th, or the 25th? Oustanding! But this is a superficial choice. Think of these buildings as floating houses with the same limitations as your regular neighborhood homes, and only a single family can inhabit them. The developers tried to make up for this fact by placing little doors in the structures' hallways and lobbies, where NPCs apparently live, but you can't come in and visit them. NPCs disappear inside and reappear outside when they want to leave because their houses literally don't exist: they're just doors in the wall. It feels like the painted on fire extinguishers in the old Tex Murphy games, which look real, and you'd swear they were real at a distance, but they're really flat as a pancake and devoid of their apparent functionality.
The third major flaw I see is the lack of free building space in the city. Added in one of the recent patches is the "World Editor" option, which seeks to add the familiar ability of Sims 2 to allow you to place new building spaces around town, but there's a problem here. If you've played Sims 2, you know the world was mostly flat - that's not the case in Sims 3. There are hills and dales and mountains and forests, and no way to edit the landscape has been provided, so any lot you place will be exactly as unsuitable for construction as it looked on the map, as hilly, as dale-y - it's like a rollercoaster for your house. Given the ability to place new highrises and attractions, the new city/town, Bridgeport, comes with a full compliment of skyscrapers and mansions and no flat building plots on which to place anything else, from nightclubs to a firestation unless you're willing to delete an existing building and displace some families to get that free plot.
Don't get me wrong, the features on display here are superb, but your neighborhood would truly be missing something if you didn't also have the Ambitions expansion pack, which adds salons and other buildings/professions your city's inhabitants will constantly make use of. The Sims games has always been judged on the sum of their parts, or expansion packs in this case, and the same is true for Sims 3. It's just that Late Night isn't as polished as it probably should have been, and while it makes an excellent edition to your Sims collection, future patches and expansions are needed to really flesh out the features that weren't fully expounded upon. Honestly, I think Bridgeport should have been a new zone to travel to from your existing game, like the countries in World Adventures, because as it is, you'll have to start a new game to take advantage of the bustling metropolis.
