Xbox 360’s Games With Gold title for the latter half of February is Crazy Taxi. As you’d expect from the name it is a car game, a taxi driver simulation game and a little bit crazy.

This is a game where you race against the clock, trying to get as many passengers to their destinations as possible. There is a level timer for game time and each passenger has their own countdown for how long they’re willing to wait before diving out of your car. The timer can be on arcade rules, 3min, 5min or 10min and on the arcade rules the timer goes up every time a new passenger is gained.

Three game modes to choose from gives the player some options for what they can choose to do. There’s arcade mode which seems like the standard game. There’s original mode which if I’m honest doesn’t seem much different from arcade. There’s also crazy box mode which is a challenge mode giving the player different things to do than just basic taxi work although some of the challenges can seem impossible.

You get a choice of drivers which only seems to have aesthetic impact and no gameplay impact which is ok but there isn’t much customisation other than this driver choice.

Points are scored by being speedy and skilful as a driver, earning more money earns more points and at the end of the level you are graded on your performance and are given a taxi licence with your grade on. Then it says game over and asks you to enter a name for the leaderboards giving the game a more arcade-like feel.

The cars themselves don’t have the best handling and the player can switch from drive to reverse. There’s even a horn that you can beep.

I personally find the game to be surprisingly fun. The open world, the slightly awkward car control and following an arrow for direction along with the short timers make this game a nice little mess about and since there’s no way to win, just ways to score you only have to aim at improving. If you’re like me and just enjoy ploughing other cars out of the way as you speed down the road then you can because there’s very little stress in this game.

I did think that maybe the game could have been improved by having a car upgrade system but then I realised that the arcade-like nature of the game and the leaderboards mean the lack of an upgrade system keeps the game fair for everyone.

This isn’t something like Fallout or Call of Duty where you’ll spend hours on it, it’s a nice little thing that’s good for a laugh and it manages to pull it’s style off perfectly in my opinion.

 

The art that I’m using as the featured image was found on the achievements section of the Xbox website. It’s bright, colourful, if you look carefully you can see that the taxi has been driven downhill and isn’t completely on the ground. If you’d never heard of the game before that artwork may draw you in.