Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast)

The Dreamcast has garnered a reputation as the ultimate underappreciated console, Sega’s swan song in the hardware department beloved by many despite failing to move enough units to keep them in the system business. Thanks to the generosity of some friends I was finally able to get one of my own and quite a few games for it to start off with, but the game I gravitated towards immediately was Crazy Taxi. Explosive and brazen in its adaptation of taxi driving, it not only brought some of the high octane arcade action Sega is known for to the Dreamcast, but it embraced its place at the turn of the century with its in-your-face attitude and blaring punk rock music.

Many who are familiar with the first Crazy Taxi game immediately think of one song that embodies the experience, The Offspring’s All I Want, a loud anthem for the chaos and lightning speed of this taxi game turned up to 11. Part of its popularity is definitely derived from being part of the game’s opening, immediately preparing you for the adrenaline rush of tightly timed wild driving, but it’s also part of an unfortunately small track list for the background music. Not counting the music for things like the credits or menus, there are only four songs that play while you ferry customers around the city, two from Bad Religion and two from The Offspring. They are all four overflowing with energy to get you pumped and have some decent hooks to latch onto amidst the sounds of traffic and screaming patrons, and while future releases on different systems expand the soundtrack, they also lose the songs that became iconic to this game. These tracks can, undoubtedly, get repetitive, but the music is a wonderful match and in a better world, the tracks that help define Crazy Taxi’s identity could have made it into the rereleases.

The fundamentals of the gameplay are definitely more important than a handful of musical tracks though, and Crazy Taxi has an effective formula for something incredibly fast paced and prone to wild action while still valuing strategy and skillful maneuvering. In Crazy Taxi, you’re shooting for a high score that takes the form of the fare people pay once you drop them off at their destination. Customers linger on the side of the road with colored symbols overhead, players choosing who to pick up for higher chances at big fares. A red symbol means their destination is nearby and thus you won’t get much cash for taking them there, but a deep green will have you go all the way across the city, the extra time it takes to get there giving you the chance to impress your patron with some exciting maneuvers. Just barely avoiding collisions with cars, pulling off long drifts, or jumping off of a ramp will earn you extra cash, and chaining together these together without hitting anything will begin to multiply the side earnings you make this way. You still need to get your customer to their destination quickly first and foremost for the best payout, but a longer drive means more chances to up your score.

However, it’s not just as simple as finding the best nearby fare and driving them to their destination. There are two styles to a session to be had, the tighter and more challenging one being an arcadey attempt to keep your run going as long as possible. You start with a small timer, but any time you pick up a passenger, you get an appropriate boost to the time you have left. A long fare can be risky since you burn much of that time bonus on a single person, and if there aren’t people in the immediate area to pick up after, you then need to waste more time searching out someone new. Your business might have to go to the shorter trips just to keep building up the clock, but whenever the time does finally run out, you’ll be graded on how much cash you managed to get to add a bit more context to your performance rather than just relying on a leaderboard. The other mode on offer removes the time additions on passenger pick-up and instead has a set amount of time, the player able to pick between 3, 5, or 10 minute sessions where they need to score as highly as possible. This still includes the idea of risking time for big payouts or trying to string a few small ones so you don’t have too much downtime, picking passengers wisely always a part of the gameplay experience. Between the arcadey mode where you build up time and the ones with set clocks, Crazy Taxi does cater to two different styles of players well and thus casts a wider net when it comes to appealing to players.

Much like the music tracks, Crazy Taxi does suffer from one other small problem when it comes to the amount of content. Crazy Taxi has two cities based on San Francisco to drive in that quickly become rather familiar. Arcade mode uses the map from the game’s arcade release and Original mode has a new one made for the Dreamcast release, and while these locations do have out of the way areas like an urban island and highways or distinct locations like the trolley hill and the winding roads near the church, their overall size does mean they aren’t quite a large sandbox you can spend a long time exploring. Their small size is a boon if you’re trying to plan out the perfect high scoring run, but a bit too much play in one sitting will begin to get samey as the destinations become places you can get to even without the green arrow at the top of the screen guiding you. That green arrow is a rather helpful tool as you’re learning even if it sometimes doesn’t account for obvious shortcuts and can have some trouble adjusting if you take them, and without it you definitely wouldn’t be able to go quite as wild with your full speed driving as the game encourages. Despite the product placement in the game being quite blatant, having destinations be something recognizable like a Levi’s store, Pizza Hut, or KFC helps cement that spot in the city in your memory and helps train you to be a more effective taxi driver.

When it comes to the cab itself, Crazy Taxi tosses aside realism hard and lets your vehicle take a beating and keep on moving. Crashing into another car may cause you to tumble around, but no one is hurt and after a bit of time spent getting your vehicle facing the right way again, you can right back into the action. In the tighter city streets or near things like staircases that facilitate jumps, you might find yourself driving on the side of a wall or road barrier briefly, and some jumps can even take you across rooftops. Your vehicle won’t lose much speed at all as it gets bashed about so long as there are no full-on collisions, but despite being rather freeing on the whole and conducive to reckless driving, sometimes the taxi seems to get caught on the ground. Coming to a stop to grab a passenger might suddenly have a wheel unwilling to cooperate, the player unable to go forward until they’ve made some small adjustment to escape. Crazy Taxi does have some advanced maneuvers like the drift and a speed boost done by switching gears, but every now and then something a little awkward like the wheel malfunction happens that seems hard to avoid.

Having special maneuvers tied to expertly timed stick shifts makes them a little hard to execute as well, which can be an issue if you decide to play the game’s Crazy Box mode. Crazy Box is a set of small missions where you try to perform an action in a good amount of time to earn better scores. Whether it’s completing a winding custom track in a short time, delivering passengers to unusual destinations, maintaining a drift, or even knocking over bowling pins, there is a good variety to the Crazy Box challenges, but the ones reliant on near perfect stick-shifting abilities can lead to frequent restarts until you’ve got them down. Repeated voice lines make this a little bothersome, but Crazy Box is a smart way of achieving some longevity, the kind that players will likely look for as the quick innings in small cities start to leave them craving something fresh.

THE VERDICT: Bursting with incredible rebellious energy, Crazy Taxi is a driving game for a player who wants to go wild behind the wheel. The taxi itself is very accommodating to exciting yet dangerous play, but there are extra maneuvers to learn and the fare system rewards a player who can add strategy and skillful driving to the high octane fun. The limited size of the two cities and the small soundtrack means it can feel like you’ve seen most of the game after only playing it a bit, but the effervescent action can still provide a good deal of excitement when it’s picked up for short casual innings.

And so, I give Crazy Taxi for the Sega Dreamcast…

A GOOD rating. The amount of content is the real kicker in Crazy Taxi. A few drivers, two cities, a small set of Crazy Box challenges, and a few different rulesets is enough to give you ways to shake things up a bit even if you chose to play it over and over again in one sitting, but it’s still quite easy to quickly see it all and, in the case of the limited soundtrack, hear it all. Still, Crazy Taxi’s over the top driving and pronounced personality make it a driving game that’s a blast to play even for people who don’t gravitate towards the genre much, the quick action easy to adapt to and the fare system easy to pick up on even without looking too deep into its systems. The arrow is an appreciated nudge towards the right destination without trivializing the challenge as you still need to drive properly to get there and are free to find extra cash opportunities as you see fit, and the minor moments of odd control don’t impact you too much once you’ve learned how to get around them better. The quick innings that make it good for pick up and play make it harder to stick to the game for long, so ultimately the biggest area for improvement is simply to take the lean parts of this title and fatten them up. For something speedy and thrilling when you’ve got little time to play a game though, it’s certainly a reliable standby.

Crazy Taxi hit on a good formula. The gameplay loop at its heart encourages exciting and energetic driving that is built around how reckless the limited time will make you play, but even the most basic systems at play for determining your fare are easy to pick up on and can be integrated into play without having to develop a deeply involved strategy. Crazy Taxi could do with more substance, but it knew the niche it was going for. Crazy Taxi not only provides an explosive bit of fun to the Dreamcast, but it’s an excellent embodiment of the wild and creative energy Sega brought to its final gaming console.