Taxi Chaos (PS4)

It’s easy to love a game and want to see more follow-ups to it. It’s much harder to try and be the person to make a follow-up to that game you love. Taxi Chaos is a fairly flagrant attempt to bring back the gameplay style of Crazy Taxi after the frenetic Sega driving series went quiet for so long, Taxi Chaos not even really trying to introduce some of its important mechanics as if it expects you to be familiar with them from Crazy Taxi first. Lacking an important eye for detail is likely why Taxi Chaos doesn’t truly feel like the game series it is trying to carry on the spirit of though, the game able to reproduce the basics but lacking the keen eye for how to make them work in its game world.

 

Taxi Chaos involves you trying to pick up and drop off as many passengers as possible in a ninety second run, although that timer is a bit flexible. Every time you pick up or drop someone off, a bit of time will be added to the session, meaning it’s not only about getting people quickly to their destination, but making sure you can swiftly go from passenger to passenger to keep the clock alive. Passengers do have their own specific timer, hopping out of the car if you’re too slow in getting them where they need to go, although unless you’re trying to get creative with your routes it’s fairly unlikely this will bother you in the game’s main mode. An arrow will appear at the top of the screen trying to point you down the roads needed to reach a destination, although it does have some clear preferences that don’t always line up with the fastest way to get around. Its almost strict adherence to taking turns normally causes it to have plenty of issues pointing in oddball directions if you do take shortcuts, especially through the massive central park, but shortcuts are crucial to actually navigating the city and more importantly adding any life to what would otherwise be a very tame driving game.

Taxi Chaos takes place in New Yellow City, its version of Manhattan able to invent a few places of its own by straying from reality but unfortunately keeping the very realistic feature of being a mostly flat city filled with tall buildings. In a driving game all about going as fast as you can and caring little for traffic rules, NYC’s design feels less than conducive to charting interesting paths to your destinations. There are a good deal of shortcuts, especially thanks to the fact you can jump with your vehicle with a simple press of the X button, and you can even get enough height to land on the roofs of small buildings. Rarely will it not be wise to take a shortcut though unless you’re already very close to the drop-off point, removing some of the considerations that would make such routes interesting. Many of them not even being that difficult to take doesn’t help the game with adding depth, and while there is the somewhat random element of traffic that might add a touch of the promised chaos to things, little glitches are probably the more crazy disruption.

 

Taxi Chaos doesn’t feel particularly stable. Sometimes the round will start with the camera inside your car or your taxi will be sliding off the sidewalk where it was deposited with little care. This is a little amusing, but you can get going easily enough despite the weird starts. Where things get stranger is the game’s efforts to spawn in the traffic that is meant to obstruct the roads. It’s fairly common to see cars fall out of the sky, suddenly burst into existence on top of another vehicle, or manifest right in front of you on what looked like a clear road. Your ability to leap over traffic can mitigate some of these issues, and sometimes you might as well drive on the sidewalk since there is no penalty and any pedestrians are pros at dodging out of the way in time.

 

Chaos only coming from glitchy car generation is a bit of a shame, but Taxi Chaos does try to have a personality despite leaning on forgettable generic rock music to back its action. There are two playable characters, the family man Vinny quick to bring up his relatives when talking to passengers while Chloe tries to be an online influencer at the same time so she tries to make deals with some of her customers. Neither of them have a huge range of regular lines, certain ones getting pretty repetitive just after the few runs needed to get to know the game and learn about the unexplained element where some customers have different colored symbols above them when you go to pick them up. However, the customers also try to talk to you, but the game almost seems to have forgotten that the goal is to get people where they’re going quickly. If a character has more to say than a generic line, it’s likely any conversation they try to drum up will be cut off prematurely by you dropping them off. They aren’t particularly funny or creative at least so it doesn’t feel like you’re missing out, and generally the action is so quick you’d not be wanting to pay much attention to chatter anyway.

There are some unique customers to find that try to add a bit more to do to Taxi Chaos since the main form of play is just repeating the same runs in a small city over and over. If you drop off specific people, they’ll ask you to find scattered items around the city, the game offering a free roam form of play that makes actually engaging with this much easier. Thankfully, these collection quests carry across all modes so you don’t need to do them in one frantic run, and these do get a little more use out of shortcuts that wouldn’t be practical to take otherwise. At the same time, collectibles can be hidden anywhere in the city and not always with logic tied to what you’re grabbing. Whether it’s briefcases, hair spray, or whoopee cushions, they’re not placed with much thought besides sometimes clustering them in one general area, collection tedious because you pretty much have to drive everywhere and hope to find them if you want to pursue one of the game’s few optional goals.

 

In the main mode, your success will be judged by two factors. One is the more clear metric of how much cash you make before time runs out, and the other will be a star rating that doesn’t explain its parameters well but usually connects to how well you did cycling customers and earning money anyway. However, each individual drop-off does have a star rating as well, these factoring in the speed of the drive but also a combo system. Your taxi is able to perform a few tricks, but not really enough to make creative use of this mechanic. You can generate boost, something that can be activated pretty easily by reversing and then going forward a bit, but it’s often only worth it when taking off from a standstill. If you weave through traffic and get very close to other vehicles, you can get a Near Miss bonus, but the detection for it is very spotty and it’s not often worth the effort since hitting a car will end a combo and hitting a police vehicle will even incur a fine. Shortcuts are at least good for adding few multipliers to the combo, but the jump is the easiest way of building it up and if you do want high star ratings, you pretty much need to find excuses to make your taxi hop around like a frog on its way to the destination. It is an uninteresting way of gaming a system that doesn’t have much room for exploration, but at least you don’t need to bother with the issues in Near Misses to get the high rating and start earning unlockable taxis with better stats.

 

The only other mode of play in Taxi Chaos beyond the main runs and free roam is called Pro mode and it is essentially just delivering passengers but without as much help from the game on guiding you. There will be no arrow or indication of how close you are to a destination, the player needing to memorize locations from going there often in the other modes so they can use a mental map to get people where they’re going swiftly. If you do care enough to look for collectibles or try and unlock taxis, you will definitely come to know certain locations, especially since there are only so many destinations. Some passengers appear in the same spots reliably and always have the same request, and New Yellow City’s mostly generic look is broken up by some of the areas with a bit more visual identity. It does feel a little rewarding for all those efforts to pay off by being able to tackle this tougher mode, but it doesn’t add that much since beyond a taxi model or two there aren’t many new rewards or interesting complications to make it worth coming back to often.

THE VERDICT: Taxi Chaos has a somewhat decent core, driving around quickly to drop off passengers at a frenzied pace having some appeal. However, New Yellow City is a poor host with straightforward shortcuts, boring streets, and traffic that sometimes appears out of thin air quite literally. Optional extras like the collectible quests are tedious rather than worthwhile and the combo system is hard to engage with meaningfully save hopping around constantly to make earning five stars more feasible. Anything that tries to build off the basics of picking up and dropping people off feels weak or outright detrimental to the experience, Taxi Chaos tolerable in short sessions but irritating the more you return to its shallow and shoddy world.

 

And so, I give Taxi Chaos for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. Taxi Chaos knows what kind of game it wants to be, it just has a poor idea of how to host it. The few saving graces it has come through when you’re trying to make mad dashes to drop off customers to keep the clock alive, and even though shortcuts don’t take much imagination or skill to take, there is a simple thrill to leaping high into the air with your car to drive off across rooftops. However, the game’s Manhattan inspired setting copies too much reality without enough fantasy, a few ramps that aren’t always even that helpful not giving the city much room for interesting exploration unless you’re scouring it for those collectibles. Without even clues on where collectibles can be though, it feels like you’re better off hoping you just stumble across them during normal play, eliminating the potential for them adding more depth to what you do. You really are just going to be playing very quick sessions in Taxi Chaos even if you get good at chaining customers together, and trying to get high scores is less exciting when they can be so reliant on bunny hopping all about to game a system that otherwise gives you little room to build natural combos. Central park is funnily enough probably the game’s best area due to it having hills and points where jumping right can be a little bit of a challenge if you want to keep your speed high, but otherwise, Taxi Chaos has mostly transplanted Crazy Taxi’s concept into a roughly built world that gives it little room to grow before you even start factoring in outright issues like cars falling from the sky.

 

Taxi Chaos’s creators seemed to have a surface level understanding of Crazy Taxi, hence why the gameplay is so similar yet so weak. You can’t just make it play the same, you need to understand the relationship between systems, you need to have a good sense for area design, and you need to create systems with more than the illusion of depth if you want to be something memorable rather than a weak facsimile of something people love. Sure, this game may scratch a somewhat similar itch for some players, but at least Sega can’t be accused of keeping Crazy Taxi hidden, rereleasing the original so often it’s likely easier to buy and cheaper than this poorly realized imitator.