It’s been almost 18 years since Crazy Taxi 3 was released and since that time, Sega hasn’t done a whole lot with the franchise. A mobile port was released that has kept the name alive – while also keeping the original game’s Offspring soundtrack intact – and enabled controller-based players to enjoy it on phones, tablets and many smart TV devices over the years. A mobile-only free-to-play game came out in 2017, and we’ve seen the Offspring and Bad Religion-less version of the Xbox 360 port of the original hit the Xbox One and now Xbox Series consoles, but nothing truly new for fans of the arcade-style action. The Crazy Taxi series is near and dear to me and the original game remains highly-playable over twenty years after its original release.
The first game’s 360 port remains a blast to play even without the original soundtrack, while the second game offered up a decent New York City-style city as a stark contrast to the original’s hilly San Francisco-inspired area. Thethird gamebrought all of those cities together in their own modes while adding in a Las Vegas-style city, and was in some ways the definitive experience since it kept in all of CT 2’s additions like jumping and multi-passenger pickups, but it’s stayed lost to time. The PC version is long-gone from stores and had a modified soundtrack, while the Xbox version of it never got a backwards compatible release on either the 360 or the Xbox One.
Now, Team6 is set to fill the void left by the lack of a new Crazy Taxi with Taxi Chaos, and does an admirable job of it. Going with New York City was a bold choice given that it was already done in CT 2 and that puts this game in direct competition with it in terms of map design and overall feel of the city. While CT 1 did a great job of replicating the feel of San Fran, the sequel’s version of NYC never quite felt right either in the daytime in the main game or at night in CT 3. Taxi Chaos nails the feel of the city with a diverse cast of characters throughout and a slew of parks, landmarks and skyscrapers. Areas like Times Square get a nice in-game variant, and having massive buildings throughout it allows the jumping mechanics to find a new purpose beyond what CT 2 and 3 did.
The city itself looks lived-in, with flaws along the streets themselves and a ton of pedestrians. Sure, many of them are here to be picked up, but not all. It helps make the world you’re traversing through seem real and the realistic proportions for the vehicles and people are one improvement for this game compared to classic CT games. The city’s layout is reminiscent of the original Crazy Taxi’s where you have a large expanse of area, but it’s also split up wisely to have different sub-sections and hub areas to use as signposts when navigating.
Having an area like a seaside port allows you to use that as a starting point of sorts in your head where you may learn the landmarks and side roads – and there a lot of side roads and intricacies to the map. It feels far more like an open world in a GTA game than a large, isolated area in an arcade game and reminds one of playing Midnight Club instead of Need For Speed Underground. In the case of the former, you had to learn the map to do well, while the latter used a more closed-off design to make it easier to learn, but at the cost of giving you a less-immersive world. Here, you have a lot of the area to explore and unlike Crazy Taxi, you can actually do so.
While the standard arcade mode isn’t the best way to do it, you can still pick up on little cues – like yellow roofs being a sign that you may have a platforming section ahead of you to learn the ropes. You can also add some challenge with the GPS-less Pro mode to test your mettle. Taxi Chaos winds up making the city the real star of the show and lets it shine in full with the freeroam mode. It’s basically an endless mode that allows you to explore the city at your leisure, while still picking up passengers and taking them to their destination. It’s very much a relaxed mode since you have no real stakes here, but still get a thrill out of finding new areas or finding shortcuts throughout the city. This freeroam mode offers up a whole new way to enjoy the core experience of taking folks to and from their destination and it’s something the game genuinely does better than any Crazy Taxi game.
The usage of jumping is nothing new as both CT 2 and 3 had it, but Taxi Chaos expands on the concept by turning the game into a mix of a driving game and platformer. you’re able to go from building to building using ramps and it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for both passengers and available routes. It reminded me a lot of how the Paris stage inTwisted Metal 2completely changed when you busted the Eifel tower down and could explore the rooftops fully. Here, you can go from area to area and see some of the game’s coolest sights – like a shiny mirror-like window-filled building as you zoom across it. Taxi Chaos offers up a lot of neat visuals, and it would be nice to see a photo mode added later on.
Jumping doesn’t work as smoothly as it did in the latter-two CT games, but that’s due to the variety of cars. Unlocking vehicles will happen through the course of regular play and when you get into the faster vehicles is when jumping feels more natural and allows you to keep your momentum. Like CT, you can gain money from your fare with jumps, but also through fast speeds and build up massive combos to top the leaderboards. There’s a lot of cool changes made with passengers as well.
While most are just regular NPCs trying to get from place to place, there are some VIP NPCs like a rock star and an alien that have you do that, but also have you find things for them. These fetch-quests are amusing and allow you to learn more about the citizens of the city while getting the best dialogue exchanges as well. Every NPC has dialogue, but it’s usually just copy/paste fare from one to the other and within a single arcade run lasting maybe ten minutes, you could have half a dozen people all have the “coming home from work, tired, one day closer to retirement” spiel – so it can get old quickly.
Traversal feels great when you get a higher-end vehicle, but small things like a handbrake would do wonders to enable more finesse to be used. The overall game feels solid – like a B-grade Crazy Taxi clone more often than not, with some weird glitches thrown in. Obstacles that should in theory be on the ground can sometimes just wind up in mid-air for no good reason, and you’ll often see massive traffic pile-ups caused by cars just being on top of one another because why not? It’s strange and shows that more care is needed with the final product, but it’s so goofy, it almost works in the game’s favor.
Other than these glitches, it’s a good-looking game that goes far beyond what I expected going in and has tons of details in the world itself that make it feel like NYC. There’s a decent amount of traffic and there’s no slowdown at all, which impressed me as I dodged traffic to jump up areas and then zoom around the city. There are minor clipping issues where your tires will go through the street a bit, but nothing major. On the audio side of things, the voice work is solid, but repetitive outside of the special NPC quests.
The soundtrack is also strangely subdued and while the Crazy Taxi console re-release got grief for not having the Offspring and Bad Religion, they did at least go with punk music, but the soundtrack here at launch is too subdued. Thankfully, you can just adjust the audio to your liking and blare whatever you want in the background. It would be nice to have Spotify Premium integration likeDangerous Drivingdid to help get around music issues, but maybe that’s something that can be added later on.
Closing Comments:
Taxi Chaos is a fun, flawed game that takes a lot of inspiration from Crazy Taxi, but does genuinely improve upon the formula in impressive ways. Freeroam allows players to learn the city to do a better job in the arcade and GPS-less modes, while having NPC fetch quests keeps things fresh and further rewards exploration. The available car selection is hit or miss, but most of the vehicles are fun to use and allow you to have a blast while darting around NYC. The soundtrack and voice work need work, and with post-launch updates planned, we’ll see how all of the issues related to the audio work out in due time. Taxi Chaos needs more polish, but still offers a lot of fun and it’s a must-play for anyone looking for a more modern-feeling version of Crazy Taxi.
