Life’s Not So Crazy
Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is the story of a game with a solid concept that lacks the polish required to be truly great, and that’s a massive shame. For those who don’t know, Taxi Life is exactly what the title suggests: a taxi driving simulator with a dash of business management thrown in. Crazy Taxi this is not.
Being set in the real-life city of Barcelona is a nice touch, but having never been to Barcelona, I can’t speak to how accurate this depiction is. Before you hit the streets, the game opens up with a tutorial section in which you get your taxi license. This is skippable, but I’d recommend doing it as it teaches you controls for things you might not expect in a standard driving game. These can range from opening windows, using wipers, or turning on lights, and it’s more important than you might think to know how to do these things quickly as your customers will sometimes request that you open a specific window or use the wipers, among other things. Luckily, most of these actions are done using a radial menu, which is opened using down on the D-Pad, and then the right stick is used to select what you want to do. Outside of this, the controls are mostly what you’d expect from a driving game: Right Trigger to accelerate, Left Trigger to brake, and so on. Just remember, being a simulator, you have to indicate when turning or changing lanes, which you do with a simple press of left or right on the D-Pad.
So, what is the moment-to-moment of Taxi Life? Well, it’s a simple and oddly relaxing gameplay loop. Go to your map, select a job which is indicated by a little green person, hover over these icons and it will tell you how much XP and Cash the job is worth. Along with this, each job will have a difficulty level, which essentially affects the customer's patience for law-breaking. That’s right, as you drive people around if you speed, forget to indicate your change to another lane, have an accident, or do anything else that you shouldn’t be doing, they will lose patience with you. The less patience they have, the lower star rating you get, making it less likely you’ll get a tip. If patience completely runs out, the job will be canceled, which also happens if you hit a pedestrian; this isn’t GTA 6!
Oh, and don’t forget to keep an eye on the length of the journey, the job details won’t give you an exact distance but it will say short, medium or long. You don’t want to take on a long journey with only a quarter of your gas tank remaining, (trust me, I know!) so make sure you remember to refuel at gas stations dotted around the map, regularly. It’s not just refueling you need to think about it either; did you have a fender bender? You’ll need to head to a garage to repair your car, as damage can impact the car’s performance and your customer's experience, which in turn affects your ability to make the most money possible. At a garage, you can also clean your car just like you can at the car washes around the city.
Perhaps most importantly, in a garage, you can buy new cars, and as you level up by gaining XP through completing journeys and finding city landmarks, you unlock better ones. Some cars are required to take on specific jobs, or they cost less money to run. You can have up to fifteen owned cars at any one time, but there are only eight models of cars to choose from. So you might be wondering why would I ever need fifteen cars? But this is where the business management aspect comes in; you can hire drivers for your company, set their working hours, and choose what area of the city they work in. Each driver comes with a buff and debuff; they might earn more cash from driving a higher-level car, but maybe they also spend more on fuel than they need to. If you’re lucky, you may even find a workaholic who will work a longer shift, resulting in more money for your company. Of course, these drivers make you money, but they also cost you a daily fee, whether they work or not, so don’t hire more drivers than you’ll need.
This also reminds me of my first issue with the game; if you use the rest function at a garage, your AI drivers won’t make you money while you’re resting, but they will still cost you money. It’s a strange decision that does two things: it makes the game more grindy than it needs to be, and secondly, it makes the rest function completely redundant and useless. Similarly, you can upgrade car parts to make cars faster or drive better, but this is pointless since you are meant to be sticking to the speed limit anyway, which every car can reach without upgrading. It’s a carrot on a stick for the sake of it and nothing more. You can do some light customization to the look of your car, changing the color or adding a dashboard item, but this is very limited.
I did see one big positive in this game, the AI driving is more realistic than any game I’ve played. You’ll have people running red lights or forgetting to indicate; you will even see random crashes happen due to these things. On occasion, I even encountered a bad crash where police had turned up to divert traffic, and ambulances were on the scene. While it wasn’t perfect AI by any stretch, I appreciate that it does something different and, as a result, more closely represents things we might see happening every day in real life. I wish there were more cars on the roads to see outside of the occasional build-up at traffic lights, though.
Unfortunately, the cool concept of what this game offers, especially with its unique feeling AI, is often let down by a lack of polish and a tirade of bugs. While the game can often look great, it suffers from excessive pop-in from nearly every visual asset around you. While roads and your car are thankfully devoid of this issue, this game has likely the most amount of pop-in than I’ve seen in some time and severely impacted my personal experience. Taxi Life is also riddled with bugs; I’ve had my car get stuck in reverse for several seconds more times than I can count. You’ll often see AI characters walking around getting stuck on trees or corners. Hell, I even had my car refuse to start the engine once after coming out of a garage. Luckily, quickly re-entering and exiting again seemed to fix this specific issue.
While there are several other issues across the bulk of the game, audio thankfully sails through with a fairly alright implementation. From different indicator sounds to the engine itself, with electric cars all having different and unique sounds, the audio is more or less pretty decent without being a standout.
Ultimately, Taxi Life is a cool concept that sets itself apart from something like the more hectic and beloved Crazy Taxi and deserves the same level of execution and resources as Asobo Studio’s Flight-Simulator series. Unfortunately, the technical shortcomings shine through the most, which takes lots of points off this otherwise unique and interesting experience. Currently, I can not recommend the title in its current state, regardless of there being an engaging simulation game buried in a host of bugs, all chipping in for cab fare through the streets of Barcelona.
Developer - Simteract. Publisher - Nacon. Released - March 15th, 2024. Available On - Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Windows. Rated - (E) - Mild Language. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - Review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
I’m Jordan I have a background in game design and am deeply passionate about accessibility in gaming. My favourite games/franchises include Shenmue, Red Dead Redemption 2, Plague Tale: Requiem, Metal Gear Solid 3, Yakuza, Splinter Cell, and Assassin’s Creed.