In June of 2023, SEGA gave a quick glimpse of what many have been asking for for years: a Crazy Taxi revival. In 2027, we will get to play what is essentially a modernized version of an arcade classic in Crazy Taxi: World Tour. But how can Crazy Taxi be modernized? Well, the team at SEGA found a way by blending the original feel with more open-world elements and giving players the choice in how they want to approach the game.
Crazy Taxi: World Tour will still keep the original time-based elements. Even in its “campaign” mode, the ability to just pick up a passenger whenever you want and start a classic arcade-mode-like run. Or you can just hop into “Classic Mode” to play an original Crazy Taxi experience. Yet in this mode, it’s to level up your taxi. How that’s going to play out remains to be seen. In the preview available at a recent SEGA event, we got hands-on time with this fever dream of a game at its newest and second of five locations: Germany.
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Driving itself in Crazy Taxi: World Tour has been improved to give you much more control of your taxi.
In terms of area design, Germany comes across as fairly basic. There’s some German architecture. The billboards and ad space are in German. And the passengers all have TERRIBLE German accents. But the fun isn’t really in exploring a new location; it’s in what’s available there. If Germany is an example of what every location will be like, then each one will be jam-packed with diverse objectives, challenges, and passengers to deliver to.
Yet the driving itself in Crazy Taxi: World Tour has been improved to give you much more control of your taxi. There’s boosting, drifting, and two different combos to give you a slight advantage. One being a hard stop (called a Crazy Stop), and the other an engine rev for a slight speed boost. To get as high a score as possible, you’re going to have to combine all these different mechanics to build nitro quickly as well as build trick combos. Ramps and shortcuts are also littered throughout the map, allowing you to pull crazy tricks and impress passengers.
Each odd job is basically a mini-challenge mission with its own unique objectives.
Without a time limit, SEGA gave us free rein to drive around the area, but insisted that we complete “Odd jobs”. Each odd job is basically a mini-challenge mission with its own unique objectives. Yet they’re all equally outrageous. One may be to deliver pizzas as quickly as possible, stacking up massive piles of pizza. Another might involve you helping a body glider go as far as possible, then stopping in a small area to launch him with the hard-stop combo. A third could be driving an Easter Bunny around, doing tricks and going over ramps to collect Easter eggs.
But the most memorable one was, by far, helping someone avoid the law and get to the airport as quickly as possible. This last one had the only appearance of police who locked on and blasted you if you were going too slow. The mission ends with the passenger literally jumping onto the plane’s wheel as it takes off. These were just a taste of the many odd jobs, with each having three additional challenges to get up to four stars.
The optional objectives in Crazy Taxi: World Tour are much more basic, though. They tended to be a mix of doing X number of jumps, pulling off Y number of nitro boosts, or trying not to hit civilian cars with a max number you can hit before you’re penalized. Mixing these side objectives with the appropriate Odd Job challenge led to a lot of repeatability to get as many stars as possible.
Crazy Taxi: World Tour doesn’t lose what made the original games and arcade game great.
Other trials on the map also involved time trials, slalom courses, and pulling off X number of tricks in a specific time period. These are also all over the map and simply started by driving through their respective gates. With both of these everywhere, the map could quickly become cluttered. Yet the map was expansive enough with a good variety of different objectives wherever you went to not be overwhelming. Plus, waypoints can be discovered to help with fast travel.
It’s ultimately an early- to mid-2000s feel, as in going more open area and giving us a checklist to complete to advance. But combining a checklist-style objective tracker with open-area exploration is really all that Crazy Taxi needs to feel modern. It doesn’t need some grounded story to tell. It doesn’t need some intricate multi-stage level full of twists and turns. No, fans of Crazy Taxi want to drive around a taxi like a madman throughout a city and drive as many passengers as possible.
So, feeding into that by giving even more outrageous things to do across different locations is exactly what the doctor ordered for a new Crazy Taxi in 2027. Crazy Taxi: World Tour does all of this. It doesn’t lose what made the original games and arcade game great. Instead, it turns up the hilarity and creates a blast of a turn-your-brain-off experience.
Crazy Taxi: World Tour is set for release in 2027 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
