Crazy Taxi: World Tour is a chaotic ride for old-school fans-but no one else

Did you also get the classic Crazy Taxi on PC in a box of some kind of breakfast cereal or rabbit pellets? It was so popular for a while that people would buy boxes just for the games, and they weren’t bad at all. For example, for a few crowns with your breakfast, you could also get Total Immersion Racing or Starsky & Hutch. It’s a shame that games no longer come with boxes of rabbit pellets and other treats. Fortunately, games like Crazy Taxi are still being made. Or rather, a new Crazy Taxi is being made.

Do you remember that wonderful, carefree era when a game could be incredibly fun simply because you had to pick up customers and get them to their desired destination as quickly as possible while listening to bangers by The Offspring or Bad Religion? If not, don’t worry. The new Crazy Taxi: World Tour is a game straight out of Sega arcades at the turn of the millennium. You play as the scruffy Axel in his convertible taxi, pick up customers, try to get them to their destination as quickly as possible, and listen to bangers by The Offspring or Bad Religion along the way. Has anything changed in the more than 25 years since then? The graphics. Maybe.

I’ve actually missed games this simple. Press the trigger on the controller and the car goes vroom forward. Move the stick and you head roughly in the direction you want to go. Naturally, there’s plenty of tire squealing and smoke, since everything has to be taken in a drift. Need to speed up? Press boost and you’ll fly forward. Need to take a sharp turn and pick up some extra bucks while you’re at it? Drift, and you can do both at once. And that’s it—you’ve mastered the basics and can play until the end of time.

Our Gamescom demo featured many classic jobs involving taking a character from point A to point B. There were also career missions, which are mostly the same thing but involve more unique characters with their own peculiar tastes. We had 7 of these missions, including one where we had to take a ballet dancer somewhere. Since he’s a ballet dancer, he wants to drift and enjoy those pirouettes. Or you can drive a skydiver who wants to break records for long jumps. Build up some speed, hit boost, and slam on the brakes at the right moment. Since he isn’t strapped in, he’ll be launched forward, and you just count the meters to see whether you can earn 4 stars for the mission. Or you can pick up an eco-activist and collect hordes of paper around the open city. And so on.

There are also plenty of side activities scattered around the world, with one route offering a time trial, another a drifting section, and so on. It’s still an open-world racing game with all the things such games are supposed to have these days, but here you feel like you’re 15 years old, playing for crowns on an arcade machine in a smoky arcade beneath a housing estate. Is that bad? Not at all! It’s just not aimed at today’s audience. The gameplay loop is too simple, and we’ll see how long it remains entertaining. The humor is... well, it’s the kind of humor where you tell a joke to a member of today’s youth and they look at you in a way that makes you physically feel yourself aging, going gray, and developing wrinkles by the second. This won’t entertain anyone whose birth year starts with a 2.

Which is a shame, because it’s simple, fast, intuitive, and chaotic. It’s a combination of elements you don’t see much these days, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I love the soundtrack; The Offspring and Bad Religion are easy to listen to on repeat. The graphics really aren’t good, but at least they’re nicely stylized, and with all the speed, chaos, and partially destructible environmental elements, you don’t really have time to examine them in detail anyway. I’m looking forward to the game’s release next year. But there probably won’t be many people like me.