Taxi Madness is a casual arcade racing game where you select one of a wide range of unlockable cabs, each of whom has different attributes: the strong muscle car, the superfast exotic supercar, the corner-drifting Japanese tuner, an American classic from the ‘60s and more: Taxi Mayhem has them all. Your goal is to try and earn big cab fares, by picking up any customers and dropping them off at their destination spots as fast as possible before you run out of time! However, beware: most customers are a little crazy. Explore a vast city with many New York inspired locations, find shortcuts, drift through corners like a pro, take impossible jumps, aggressively bash your way through traffic hour and earn good money while doing so!
Features
Rush through the bustling city to deliver your crazy customers!
Explore a colorful and immense city (inspired by NYC)
Jump and stunt to discover shortcuts.
Pick up bizarre passengers, from a hipster and plumber to a rock star and alien!
Drive in 7 extreme taxi's, from the yellow classic cab to real muscle car.
This game seemed to come out of nowhere when I first heard about it from a YouTuber, RGT85. Apparently, it is a spiritual successor to the Sega classic, "Crazy Taxi". It's also not developed or published by Sega, with the exception of in Japan where Sega is indeed publishing it.
The game is available on both Switch and PS4 (PS5), and at the time of writing looks about the same on each console. I grabbed the PS4 version as the Switch version had sold out. It is currently the same price in physical or digital format, so I opted for a copy to add to my library. That said the game seems to load textures further out faster on PS4, though on Switch it just swaps lower for higher resolution textures as you drive closer to objects like building windows. This is a feature most games use, especially those on Switch to conserve RAM memory.
Visually like I said it's currently running at a somewhat low resolution, I would assume between 720p and 1080p, where on PS4 Pro or PS5 you would assume it could handle at least 1080p or better.
Gameplay wise, it plays very similar "Crazy Taxi", with the addition of being able to have your car jump. This extra jump option, while unrealistic in this already unrealistic arcade style point to point racer, is actually pretty convenient. The controls are great and if you were a fan of "Crazy Taxi" you should feel right at home in this game.
Sound. The game has a fairly limited rock track that can get old quickly. There is no Green Day here. Also while the new character voices offer a lot of dialog during your trips, many offer the same dialog all too frequently with a lot of repetition.
At a $30 title, I'm willing to overlook some of the game's flaws like its lower resolution visuals and repetitive customer chatter. The core gameplay is where this game shines for that I can easily recommend the game to anyone wanting to give it a try.
