On paper, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator seems like a great time. Leisurely picking up fares in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, Barcelona. Exploring and finding points of cultural interest, forming and customising your own taxi company — it all sounds like a relaxing experience, right? Wrong.
While there’s no denying that the beauty of Barcelona has been captured and Taxi Life gives up a visually spectacular offering, this feels like it’s at the detriment of the player experience. Moving between areas, the frame rate frequently tanks, causing some major input lag and turning what should be a smooth and relaxing title into a bit of a nightmare.
Taxi Life wants you to act as if you’re actually driving. There are no GTA-style manoeuvres here — you’ve got to abide by traffic regulations. You’ll get fines for speeding, going the wrong way up roads, running red lights etc., and you’ll get granted less tips and fares from customers if your car is beaten up and damaged. Unfortunately, penalties sometimes seem hard to avoid with AI drivers and pedestrians inducing more road rage than their actual real-life counterparts. Slowly coming to a stop at a red traffic light frequently saw us being rear-ended, with our customer asking if we actually knew how to drive.
Taxi Life has so much promise, but in its current state it’s extremely hard to enjoy. Some menu options still have Xbox buttons assigned to them – press A, we were told. One accident we were in saw our car flipped onto its back (maybe the road rage had gotten to us at that point), and we had to quit the game and reload just to be able to move the taxi again. The lack of polish feels evident throughout the game, and it’s a real shame, because the concept is a compelling one.
Comments 11
So stick with taxi mini game of Yakuza 5? 🤔
(Not the racing bit)
The ps app says I've been playing this for 18 hours so far and I have to agree 100% with all the problems listed here. The pedestrians are the worst. If a car is blocking the crosswalk when they try to cross, oh boy. I had 8 npcs bumping into the car and themselves, forcing them to cross back and retry again. That being said, I still like it, it's become my game to play while i listen to music. I can only hope it gets patched soon.
Genuinely interested to play this, but probably not enough to actually buy it.
I'll more than likely wait till it inevitably gets given away on PS Plus at some point
I’ll just stick with Space Taxi.
Seems fun to drive around the city with a steering wheel. Maybe when it's dirt cheap and fixed up a lil bit.
(Because other than this, I don't think there is a sim/ racer where you drive around calmly in an openworld)
So happy I didn’t purchase this - I was very close to as well…
That’s disappointing, this isn’t my usual game but this seemed to have genuine promise. Maybe when it’s patched and free as a PS+ monthly game I’ll give it a spin
Always seemed a dead on arrival to me. Maybe they realized that and rushed the publishing to avoid other expenses. You know you have a taxi game in gta v? And at least you have plenty other activities once you get bored of playing a taxi, that is after 5 minutes..
Mrs wanted this so I showed her the review. She wants Planet Zoo now
I was interested in this and was going to pick it up after I've finished FF7 Rebirth. Glad I didn't bother as it sounds like it hasn't lived up to expectations.
Oh well. Back to the GTA taxi missions it is.
That's somewhat disappointing, this would have been my sort of game. Oh well, guess there's plenty of other good games to play.
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