Crazy Taxi is back. It’s part of Sega’s push to bring its greatest hits and franchises to a new generation of gamers — refreshed, remade and presented in widescreen. It’s also aimed at the game’s superfans, with a soundtrack pulled straight out of 1999.
Kenji Kanno, creator of the original Crazy Taxi, is working as creative producer of World Tour and is excited by everyone’s reaction as he careened down steep roads, swerved across squares and even dived into the sea, all in the iconic yellow taxi we all still remember. The core experience hasn’t changed: You’re still picking up and dropping off passengers, attempting to make the trip in the most unhinged (and high-scoring) way possible.
During a hands-off demo, World Tour looks like a more vibrant, open world. There are pedestrians pretty much everywhere, and a lot of traffic on the roads, trying to make your taxi-driving job harder. Fortunately, most cars and vehicles have that arcadey floatiness to them, so your taxi can punt them off the road with relative ease. Each driving region also comes with a nighttime permutation, which Kanno himself seemed very satisfied with.
The producer added that World Tour will include a story mode in addition to missions and open-world driving. Crazy Taxi, as it was — a solo arcade racer — understandably needed more to do to stand alongside contemporary games.
Beyond free-roaming the roads, missions and diversions like time attacks and one-on-one races can be discovered organically, as well as the more… “crazy” special missions that ensure the game lives up to its name.
One mission we’re shown involves delivering a stack of 20 pizzas to specific locations while ensuring you don’t lose many along the way. As the car launches from ramps and jumps, the pizza stack behaves like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, briefly escaping gravity before neatly stacking back together.
We’re also shown a bizarre fishing mission where you use the taxi’s momentum to cast a line into the ocean. To reel your catch in, you have to perform a back dash. Pull it offand you’ll land pufferfish, sharks or even a pirate ship’s wheel. Cleverly, this fishing game — if you can call it that — is actually a well-disguised tutorial for the back dash. Hopefully, the team brings more of these mad tasks into the full game. It reminded me of the unhinged side quests in Sega’s Yakuza series, in a good way.
There’s also an “off the clock” option to tap out of these spontaneous activities at any time and smoothly continue driving around the world without interruption. Having said that, some activities, like a time-attack speed challenge, were pretty short — over before they’d begun.
It arguably wouldn’t be a Crazy Taxi game without its time-capsule soundtrack – the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game lost many of the music licenses and suffered for it. Fortunately, Kanno said that we should “keep [our] expectations high” for the artists Sega is apparently working to bring on board. The demo we saw had The Offspring’s “All I Want,” if that helps assuage some fears.
There’s no concrete release date yet, but Sega says the game will launch in 2027.
Credit: Source link
