I played the original Crazy Taxi on my Dreamcast so much the disc doesn’t really work anymore.
To be fair, SEGA’s GD-ROMs were notable for scratching easily, but I didn’t have this problem with any of my other games from the era. I generally look after all of my things really well.
No, the home console conversion of Kenji Kanno’s arcade outing is quite simply one of my favourite games of all time.
Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to both speak to the big man and get my hands on an early build of the new game Crazy Taxi: World Tour at Gamescom last week.
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This was an incredibly early build running on base PS5 hardware, but a closed beta test of the multiplayer mode is set to deploy later this month, so I’m eager to see how that fares.
I was dropped behind the wheel as returning protagonist Axel in the newly announced Germany sandbox, which felt fitting given I was in Cologne.
In fact, I had a lot of fun exploring and discovering Cologne Cathedral is included in the map itself, situated next to the giant train station that’s located in the centre of the city.
Crazy Taxi is a game intended to be played at breakneck pace, but I did pause for a moment to pan the camera here, given I’d walked around the exact same area just a few hours before my hands-on. Uncanny.
Kanno tells me that World Tour intended to go international from the “beginning” of the project, and there’ll be five locations in the final game.
We already know the San Francisco map from the original will return, so it’ll be interesting to see which cities are represented next. I’m expecting London and Tokyo, but the director wouldn’t confirm either way.
This new game is structured a little differently to its predecessors, in that there’s no countdown clock until you pick up your first passenger.
Once you collect somebody, the familiar sounds of punk rock bands like The Offspring and Bad Religion will play, and you’ll find yourself dashing from landmark to landmark. (Germany includes places like castles and beer halls, as well as shops from real-life brands like Puma.)
You can keep playing until the timer expires like traditional Crazy Taxi, or “clock-off” at any time. This allows you to explore freely, and there are various activities within the map for you to interact with.
These include little time trial challenges within the world itself, or quests with unique gameplay mechanics.
There’s a strong sense of humour here, and it’s clear the game isn’t taking itself seriously.
For example, one mission saw me pick up a man in a wingsuit, who wanted to test out the capabilities of his newly purchased gear. I needed to drive to a nearby hill as fast as possible and perform a “crazy brake” to send him catapulting through the sky.
In this mission, I could earn “stars” based on how far he flew; others require you to drive quickly or earn a high score through other means.
These missions reminded me of the Crazy Box minigames from the original Dreamcast game, and I asked Kanno if they were an inspiration at all.
“It wasn’t just Crazy Box that inspired the quests,” he tells me. “We collected lots of different ideas across the team to create the various missions.”
These quests take a few minutes to complete at most so I’m interested to see how many are in the final game.
In another mission, I had to chase down a plane on a runway, while one more saw me picking up passengers dressed as the Easter bunny as fast as possible.
The controls have been modernised, so you no longer need to manually put your car into reverse. But you can still push R2 and Circle simultaneously to get a boost, while sliding your thumb across Cross/X and Circle puts you into a slide.
Kanno tells me the team wanted to make the game more accessible, but I think the minor control changes are more to reflect modern times personally.
As I mentioned earlier, this demo did feel early, and while I enjoyed my time with it there’s clearly a lot of work to be done.
I think the environment art is a little flatter than I’d like it to be, although I did appreciate some aspects of the team’s take on Germany, like the trains. I’m also not overly impressed with the new character designs, as I’ve mentioned before.
In fact, I asked Kanno directly about this.
“As you know, the characters in the original game were half naked, so we thought it was better to have them wear something,” he laughs, perhaps referring to Gena’s new-look first and foremost.
To be honest, I’m not sure classic west coast songs like The Offspring’s ‘All I Want’ and Bad Religion’s ‘Ten in 2010’ necessarily fit the vibes of Germany, so I wonder whether there’ll eventually be different rock songs for the various maps.
Kanno wouldn’t comment on any future soundtrack announcements, but he did promise me “there’ll be a surprising announcement real soon”, so I’m excited to see what that entails.
All in all, I think World Tour feels “right” in the hands and clearly has a bit more scope to it than the original.
But I’m still not fully convinced by the art – even though I like some of the details in the Germany map – and the build still needs a ton more polish before it’ll be ready for primetime.
Kanno seems like a cool dude, though, and he clearly understands what makes this franchise tick.
There’s absolutely no way I’ll be skipping this game, as it’s been one of my most wanted franchise revivals for decades at this point.
