Crazy taxi is back. It’s part of Sega’s effort to bring its biggest hits and franchises to a new generation of gamers – refreshed, remade and brought to the widescreen. It’s also aimed at superfans of the game, with a soundtrack straight from 1999.
Kenji Kanno, creator of the original Crazy taxi, works as a creative producer of World Tour and is excited by everyone’s reaction as he hurtles down steep roads, through squares and even dives into the sea, all in the iconic yellow taxi we all still remember. The core experience hasn’t changed: you continue to pick up and drop off passengers, trying to make the trip as unbalanced (and efficient) as possible.
During a hands-off demonstration, World tour feels like a more dynamic and open world. There are pedestrians everywhere and a lot of traffic on the roads, which makes your job as a taxi driver more difficult. Fortunately, most cars and vehicles have this arcade buoyancy, so your taxi can run them off the road with relative ease. Each driving region also features a nighttime swap, which Kanno himself seems very happy with.
The producer added that World tour will include a story mode in addition to open-world missions and driving. Crazy Taxi, as it was – a single-player arcade racing game – naturally needed to do more to stand alongside contemporary games.
Beyond free roaming the roads, missions and diversions like time attacks and head-to-head races can be discovered organically, as well as more… “crazy” special missions that ensure the game lives up to its name.
A mission presented to us involves delivering a stack of 20 pizzas to specific locations while ensuring you don’t lose many along the way. When the car drives off the ramps and jumps, the pizza stack behaves like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, briefly escaping gravity before carefully re-stacking itself.
We’re also shown a strange fishing mission where you use the taxi’s momentum to cast a line into the ocean. To bring your grip back, you need to sprint backwards. Remove it and you’ll land on puffer fish, sharks or even the wheel of a pirate ship. Cleverly, this fishing game – if you can call it that – is actually a well-disguised backdash tutorial. Hopefully the team will bring more of these crazy tasks into the full game. It reminded me of the disjointed side quests of Sega’s game. Yakuza series, in a good way.
There is also an “off-hours” option to enjoy these spontaneous activities at any time and continue traveling the world smoothly, without interruption. That said, some activities, like a timed attack speed challenge, were quite short – over before they started.
It would probably not be a Crazy taxi game without its time capsule soundtrack – the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game lost many music licenses and suffered for it. Fortunately, Kanno said we should “keep[our]expectations high” of the artists Sega is apparently working to recruit. The demo we saw contained 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.
