Taxi Chaos Review (Nintendo Switch)

Ahhh the dreamcast! This is honestly my favourite console of all time! In the late 90’s when all my friends seemed to be smitened with 100+ hour RPGs and campaign shooters, I was still chasing the thrill from the action games in the arcade and the Dreamcast was the first time we would get arcade perfect ports at home.

And this tied in perfect with Sega’s offerings at the time, taking somewhat mundane professions and flipping them into high octane action games. The best example of this being 1999 Taxi simulator, Crazy Taxi.

Sadly as years passed and the popularity of arcades has declined, the ‘quick fix’ appeal of arcade style games has mostly been relegated to micro transaction riddled mobile games. With little interest in the franchise from Sega themselves, G2S Games have written their own love letter to Crazy Taxi in the name of Taxi Chaos!

If you know how to play Crazy Taxi, you know how’s to play Taxi Chaos. You drive around a virtual city, pick up as many punters as possible and deliver them to their desired destination before the timer runs out. Rinse and repeat to improve your skills and chase the all important high scores.

In general the game controls feel solid. A little more floaty than its spiritual parent but it still feels great to dart about the virtual New York City. It keeps all the important features like the boost start and even add an addition jump feature new to this style of game, adding a fun wrinkle to the tried and tested game play formula. 

The city feels well designed with notable landmarks helping you to learn where about you are relative to other areas, but a lack of traffic and pedestrians can make the city feel a little lifeless at times, like having your taxi shift at 6am on a Sunday, but the developer has addressed this and will add more pedestrians in a future update. 

The graphics look fine. A little soft and generic looking for my taste but that’s also how I feel about fortnights style, which probably says more about my bad taste than it does about the game designers choice of style. The game can hitch in frame rate from time to time on the Switch, but nothing that really takes you out of the action.

The sound is the one area I found a little disappointing. Crazy Taxi was loved for it overly animated voice overs and high energy licensed punk rock sound track. Taxi Chaos in comparison has milquetoast in game announcements and a bizarrely chilled, generic sounding deep house soundtrack which is the polar opposite of what an action game like this needs. The developer has addressed this too and promises heavier sound track to compliment the action soon after launch.

The price of £30 at launch feels a little steep for the content in the game to be honest. The fairly standard £15.99 indie game price would have felt perfect in my opinion but the less demand there is for game genre, the higher price people will have to pay to warrant the developers time and resources to work on it. And there are no micro transactions in game, so this may justify the higher price to some degree. 

Over all I enjoyed my time with Taxi Chaos. In almost every aspect the game if feels a little less intense and bombastic than its role mode from Sega. A little less aggressive controls, a softer look and sound track, which in my opinion was all a big part of the charm of Crazy Taxi, but in the absence of any real interest in the franchise from Sega, Taxi Chaos is fun way to scratch that classic arcade taxi sim itch… either that or apply for your Uber licence…