It’s finally happening, after decades and a mobile game spin-off, Crazy Taxi is at the wheel again for a brand-new entry to the arcade driving game. This was a game series that has arcade machines with steering wheels, pedals, a gear shifter that only switches between Drive and Reverse and no seat, because this mad depiction of the humble ride-sharing service isn’t making you drive at the edge of your seat, it surpasses that threshold altogether by going over the edge and be rid with it. It firmly made The Offspring and Bad Religion a core memory to gamers of the early 2000s, even beyond those who played the game in the arcades. Its home console releases on the Dreamcast and other consoles of the generation, were one of the better arcade ports out there, during an age where home console hardware has finally caught up with arcade machines.
And then, Crazy Taxi just went dormant.
Until now.
But is it as crazy as it was today?
Crazy Taxi: World Tour is doing a few different things other than just bringing back Crazy Taxi. It has online multiplayer modes with ranked matches. It has vehicle and character customisation. And as the title implies, you’d be taking fares around the world, beyond the USA the previous numbered entries were constrained to.
But judging by what’s offered in the Closed Network Test, there’s a lot more work needed to get this taxi compete in a ride-sharing world.
Less-Crazy Moves For The New Generation
First thing of note here, I personally haven’t played any of the Crazy Taxi games, but I was there in the era when it was a thing. I know enough of what makes it so good, why it spawned a bunch of Crazy Taxi-likes, and the tech and skill players need to master that makes it stand out.
And let’s start with that one first, all the Crazy moves. It’s all here, but Sega has opted to modernise the control scheme to fit the norm of a typical racing game, rather than sticking to the original’s quirk, which all the Crazy moves were bound to. The result of this compromise is that it still plays well, but now the game design choices feel off, thematically speaking.
Crazy Taxi’s main gameplay gimmick lies in that Auto transmission. Most arcade games back in the day have an option to use Auto or Manual transmission, the latter requires one to make use of the H-shifter attached to these machines, in the days where cars are more available with manual gearing. But Crazy Taxi is a little loco with this as there’s only Auto transmission, but there’s still a lever where players need to switch between Drive and Reverse gears.
Switch to Reverse, let go of the accelerator, then quickly switch back to drive and hit the pedal to the metal and you get a Crazy Dash. This is Crazy Taxi’s version of boost, which requires mechanical prowess to pull off instead of just collecting boost to fill a bar or drive on a boost pad.
As the game involves a lot of stopping, the precise way to make a full stop is pulling a Crazy Stop: switch the gear to Reverse and hit the brakes and you’ll instantly stop.
Pulling a Crazy Drift isn’t a brake-to-drift experience, you need to hit Reverse and switch back to Drive again as you steer hard to get that tail end loose. Now imagine doing these Drive and Reverse gear switches with an actual lever, it’s insane!
With Crazy Taxi: World Tour, the idea of switching gears have been oddly scrapped, but the Crazy moves are kept. Hold brake while stopping and you’ll automatically reverse. There’s a Drift button mapped to what most racing games have it as the handbrake which is how you burn rubber and go sideways, essentially brake-to-drift. You also can earn boost by collecting nitro bottles. This is all intuitive to the modern gamer, but I feel like it’s a wrong step for Crazy Taxi: World Tour to take.
For the first few minutes in the Closed Network Test, I just relied on my natural instincts and play Crazy Taxi: World Tour as a normal racing game and it feels a little off, but doable. The brakes are bad that it doesn’t come to a halt fast enough when you need to drop passengers off the drop zone. I can’t figure out how other cars get that initial boost on the “Ready, Go!” count like kart racers usually have. I can certainly drift like I expected to so that’s nice, but everything else didn’t quite click. That is until I looked up the online manual and find out how to do the Crazy moves. Now we’re Crazy Taxying!
But it’s weird though. All those moves that requires a gear change? That’s now abstracted to a button press mapped to Circle on the PS5 controller. Want to Crazy Dash? Circle + accelerate. You can still pull the Limiter Cut, a chain of Crazy Dashes, but you’re not switching to Reverse and Drive again, just press Circle and accelerate over and over. Crazy Stop and Crazy Back Dash are still available, and yes, you just press the action button for those too and hit Brake, which now automatically goes into reverse after the car goes to a complete stop.
The change means that the gear indicator on the HUD just feels like set dressing, since you’re not actively switching gears anymore. It’ll always stuck in D. High-skill Crazy Taxi playthroughs will see that indicator switching to and fro over and over, but it won’t be for World Tour.
As Crazy As It Probably Was Back Then
That all being said, the feel of playing Crazy Taxi: World Tour, once I come to terms with the control changes, feels like a good ol’ arcade racer of the 2000’s. A lot of the little intricacies of the original games are replicated. In particular the mechanics of parking to pick up a passenger. The closer you are to them, the faster they get in. Too close, and they’ll dodge out of the way and will have to spend a longer time running back to the cab all while moaning about if you have brake pad issues. You also can start moving, or better yet, pull a Crazy Dash, just as the passenger’s feet are off the ground as they enter the cab, in both sense of the word.
Fun fact: all the taxi cabs in Crazy Taxi are cabriolets, open-top cars.
At it’s best, Crazy Taxi: World Tour feels like Crazy Taxi of yore. Punk rock music blaring while you traffic checking an entire highway lane worth of cars as your passenger berates you for every little wrong thing. Pure bliss when wild things are happening as cars are flying and your passenger(s) judge you for your hype/terrible driving. And now it’s on top of a wilder multiplayer package with other players ramming each other and scrambling to get their fare at all costs.
Speaking of, the multiplayer modes. The first one, Pickup Race, is basically a normal race dressed up with taxi mechanics. You’ll be driving from point A to point B all while picking up and dropping off one mandatory passenger. Supposedly you’re still judged by how fast you get them to their destination, but it doesn’t seem to matter, first to reach the final destination and drop off their last passenger wins.
It’s a peculiar way of doing races, but there is some novelty. Having six cars fighting for parking as they all divebomb to the same exact spot is hilarious. It’s a shame that these are all linear races. The maps of Crazy Taxi aren’t exactly like you’d expect from an open world racing game—a lot of long highways and roads connecting a few blocks of a street grid. The new Germany map is designed like West Coast, in that it has a few spots where it feels like a city grid with a bunch of intersections, but to get to the other city block you just drive that one road, which in this case includes a stretch of the Autobahn. In other words, this is no Midtown Madness or Midnight Club, but it is as Crazy Taxi should be, for better or worse.
The Precision Races, where the drop-off zones have a smaller square, is really cool. Not only is it a skill check to see if you can Crazy Stop effectively, but also can you do so without exposing yourself from getting rammed by other cabbies all vying for that small parking space in front of Five Guys. Yes, branded stores are still a thing.
The other new multiplayer mode is Cops and Cabbies. The Cabbies need to meet a quota of passengers all while cops are chasing them. Cops can ram the Cabbies down and when their car breaks down, they get sent to “jail” at the center of the map. Other Cabbies can bust them out if that happens. The Cops win if the Cabbies don’t meet their quota.
This mode cordoned a part of the bigger map and turn it into a small playground that fits it. But this mode feels so abstracted away from the theme of being taxi drivers. Why the heck do these cabbies get chased by cops? Is it illegal to run a taxi business these days? It’s not like you can scam them by bloating up the fare.
I guess these punk cabbies took that Offspring album which All I Want and Change The World from the game’s soundtrack to heart. Ixnay On The Hombre, amirite, amigos?
I expected that there is some form of strategy which the cabbies side have to consider as they do taxi rides while in hot pursuit from the fuzz. Passengers either want to drop at point A or point B, but once you pick a passenger of a specific point, you’ll only able to pick up other passengers looking to head there as well. There’s nothing to it. Just keep sending these folks to where they needed to be without getting wrecked by the cops. If they do, you’d be sitting in jail until a fellow cabbie busts you out.
Cops and Cabbies as a game mode is fun enough, but it just seems lacking something. It feels like I’m just playing a racing game with some fun arcade modes, but not a Crazy Taxi game with fun arcade modes, if that makes any sense.
On that note, a few more Crazy Taxi-isms that I don’t see in the Closed Network Test. You don’t see the dollars and cents rake up as you pull off Crazy moves. And passengers, at least in these two modes, don’t specify you where you’re supposed to be headed.
Look, when I pick up five guys in the not-Sambabus I want to see the picture of the Five Guys these five guys are headed. Otherwise, what’s the point? Maybe don’t make it obnoxiously take up space in the screen, sure, but a reassurance of where you’re headed should be a thing. Taxi drivers know exactly what their destination is.
Closing Thoughts
I still think Crazy Taxi: World Tour has potential, but the Closed Network Test hasn’t quite impressed me just yet.
The customisation options, including ability loadouts which may or may not inspired by Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, might be cool. The graphics need a lot more polishing. And in some cases, literally. The chrome bars in front of the Yellow Jacket cab should be shiny, not all artefact-y and pixely with jittering black spots. Even the menu music needs tighten up, the transition between two songs in the customisation menu feels off, the drum fills feels like it’s overlapping onto itself rather than what supposed to be real smooth switch to a different tempo of music.
My biggest worry is that Crazy Taxi: World Tour doesn’t lean enough into the theme of being a crazy taxi driver. The two online modes here feel like a racing game wearing a Crazy Taxi skin. The game needs to lean into that fantasy, that world, where in today’s world of ride-sharing apps and autonomous driving that’s squeezing out traditional taxi drivers, you’re here ferrying fares the old fashion way, scaring the socks off your passengers with some crazy driving and getting tips for doing so.
What’s in the Network Test feels dry and lacking personality. Maybe the single-player campaign will still deliver that, but I wish the multiplayer modes have some more of that flavour this game sorely lacking as it’s presented here.
That all being said, fan reception from those who played the Closed Network Test seems to be all positive from what I see on socials. Am I the crazy one here, thinking that Crazy Taxi: World Tour looks set to be a middling, unambitious game? Between all the little niggles I had as well my experience finding a full lobby of players in the Asia/Oceania servers being a struggle (the most I had is four of six slots filled), I think this game needs more work still. But there are clearly happy players who had enjoyed this small slice of this upcoming revival of an arcade hit.
Regardless, there’s still time for the development team at Sega to get Crazy Taxi ready for the World Tour. Hopefully the final release will win me over and prove me wrong.
Crazy Taxi: World Tour releases in 2027 for the PS5, PC (Steam, Microsoft Store), Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.
Played on base PS5. Access to Closed Network Test provided by the publisher.