Crazy Taxi: World Tour Preview – Taxi me to the tram stop on time

Crazy Taxi comes out of Sega’s heyday as a giant of arcade gaming, whipping up cabinets that try to toe the line between rewarding skill and pinching coins from your pocket to get extra lives and continues. The original trio of Crazy Taxi games were all high score chases with just a couple of minutes of play time each time to challenge you to get as many passengers to their destinations as quickly as possible, each success netting you a few extra seconds to play.

Bitesized and fun, but even in the few years between 1999 and 2002, the formula was worn thin with critics. But it’s remained a cult classic, with the occasional ports and re-releases, and now Sega are trying to reinvigorate it with Crazy Taxi: World Tour.

The first thing on the chopping block for Crazy Taxi: World tour is the hard limit on your play sessions, starting with a countdown timer and bouncing you back out to the menu. Each play session now drops you into the open-world city maps to explore and play at your own leisure. Naturally, that does let you still take on short and sharp arcade high score chases, but once the timer runs out (and now you can deliver that final passenger after the main timer has run down) you just…. carry on. You can go and pick up another fare to start off another race against the clock, or you can find other missions and bespoke characters.

Revealed at Gamescom, the German city map often had me tricked into thinking it was actually Cologne. The Hauptbahnhof and the very familiar-looking cathedral in particular threw me for a loop, but then I ventured further and found the more mountainous roads, the overlooking castle, and more that definitely weren’t the Cologne that I know. Still, it’s a fun mish-mash of thematic content and ideas, and provides a good bit of visual variety, especially as you pick up passengers that need you to take them to regional store chains and places.

Your driving is enhanced by a bunch of ‘Crazy’ abilities. There’s a Crazy Dash to get you up to speed with a pseudo launch control and add a consistent boost while driving, there’s Crazy Drift for racking up tips through corners, and a Crazy Stop to bring you to a halt right when you need to so people can hop out. Everything builds up your nitro… sorry, Crazy Nitro, to give you a much bigger boost. The only crazy thing that’s missing is a frog.

But it’s not just the race to get passengers to where they want to go, there’s also a bunch of other missions and challenges dotted around the city. Some are time trials and drift challenges, the usual type of open-world racer fare, but then there’s a whole host of thoroughly strange characters who have specific missions. Albrecht wants to enjoy as much drifting as possible, Oskar has you racing against his “wife” – it’s actually just a sports car, but you do you, Oskar – and then there’s Ggoora-Zha, the space alien who wants to see what driving is like on Earth.

Yeah, it gets thoroughly bizarre.

But then Crazy Taxi was always a barmy game. It’s a non-stop barrage on the senses for a few minutes at a time, your passengers constantly yammering in delight or dismay as you weave through traffic and find the best route to their destination, and you’ve got The Offspring playing in the background like it’s 1999 all over again.

This weekend sees the Open Network Test for Crazy Taxi: World Tour, another side to the game which allows you to compete with up to six players in games of Pickup Race and Cops ‘N’ Cabbies. It’s sure to be rather daft and I’m keen to give it a go.