Fails to have the same charm as it did on the Dreamcast
The objective of Crazy Taxi is to pick up a passenger with your taxi, drop off, make some money and pick up a new passenger before your time runs out.
Crazy Taxi's gameplay isn’t as good as it may seem. The control in the game is well… bad. It doesn’t feel like your driving a real car but more like pointing something where to go. I guess you would call this type of handling ‘arcade style handling’. When you hit or bump into things it is all very unrealistic. You pretty much are in an indestructible taxi that plows through or stumbles over obstacles. The city your drive around in is fairly large and it resembles San Francisco. There are two starting points to start at when you start driving. The starting point depends on what game mode you are in. There is Arcade mode and Original mode which are very similar. Arcade mode gives you a starting amount of time and as you deliver passengers you earn more time and you lose when time runs out. Original Mode is where you get a set amount of time to earn as much money as possible in that amount of time. One of the things I like about this game is the third game mode called Crazy Box. In here the game will give you challenges to complete in a certain amount of time or some other feat. For example you might have to make a jump so many meters or knock over so many objects.
The graphics in Crazy Taxi are average, nothing is really good and nothing is really bad. Everything has some pretty bland textures. The scenery is mostly pre-rendered, and anything that isn’t pre-rendered has very little detail. Although the city is very large, something you will definitely get lost in. So maybe it evens out.
In Crazy Taxi the sound effects are actually mediocre. The nice part about them is the voice acting between the driver and the passenger. Some of the phrases that they say are pretty funny. I like it how when you are going slowly or hitting lots of cars the passenger will start getting angry at you or if you are going very fast and gaining lots of time the passenger will start cheering for you. The downside to the sounds is the car sounds or the lack of car sounds. You can pretty much only hear a rev of the engine, a squeal of the tires and a slam of the breaks. When you run into obstacles it doesn’t make a realistic sound either. There are about a dozen songs from the bands Offspring and Bad Religion. The music goes great with the game and I personally liked it. After a while these few songs get repetitive and sickening. Though if you don’t like the music in the game I am afraid you are out of luck because that is all there is to listen to in the game. To finish this game on Arcade mode it takes about fifteen minutes. That’s all. To unlock everything in this game and beat the game with all four characters it might take about five hours. It would depend on how much trouble you are having with it. There is a high score table in this game, this means you can pretty much beat your own scores or you could have a small competition with your friends. Woo...
I would recommend people to rent Crazy Taxi before buying it just to make sure it is their kind of game. I would also recommend the Dreamcast version over the PlayStation 2 because I need to root for the underdog. I would advise this to anyone who likes arcade style racing games or if you have a fetish with taxies. I wish there were more cities to drive around in, larger differences between the cab drivers than there already is, more things to do in the Crazy Box, and more variety of music.