REVIEW | Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator

Simulation games just keep popping up like mushrooms. They are not all pretty with a red colour and white dots, no… there are quite a few that look mouldy and poisonous and are therefore best avoided. Fortunately for Taxi Life, this one falls into the positive category. Despite the fact that it certainly won’t be for everyone, it’s still fun!

The concept is super simple, you start up a taxi company in beautiful Barcelona and take people from point A to B, taking a realistic approach to road rules. So don’t think you are going to play Sega’s Crazy Taxi because you will be disappointed. Simteract, the developer is no newcomer to the simulation world, previously they released Train Life. Now the trains are put away and taxis are taking over.

Things I liked!

• Gameplay | Trying to follow traffic rules is something I did sometimes in GTA, or tried to. Following traffic lights nicely, keeping a sensible speed and very importantly not knocking over pedestrians. This gameplay perfectly describes Taxi Life. With even more detail! For example, you have to blink when going right or left, yes, even with a mercedes! I understand that something like this will sound boring to some but I find it enjoyable. Combined with delivering passengers who sometimes chat or have a specific question. There are different levels of tolerance, with easy passengers you may still occasionally run a red light or drive too fast, you will be penalized but you haven’t lost your passenger. With the difficult passengers you really have to, as in real life hopefully, follow the rules perfectly.

Neither good nor bad

• Story | A cutscene welcomes you in Barcelona. A touristic heaven to a great place to start a new taxi company. Those two short lines explain the story in Taxi Life… does the game need more to be a better game experience? I guess not, but I would have loved to see a bit more personally in the story of the game. some extra rivalry with another company, for example? Or create personalized routes for tourists? There is a lot of potential but they are taking the lazy route with a completely missing storyline.

Things I disliked!

• Other drivers | In our real world AI is getting better by the minute, but the car and pedestrian NPCs in Taxi Driver are still stuck in the Stone Age. Seriously, it’s like watching a bunch of cavemen! As to be expected in a driving simulator, you have to follow the driving rules. For example, stop for pedestrians when they want to cross. As a kid, I now understand why I played a game at zebrads not to touch the white surfaces. After all, Taxi Driver proves it that those white surfaces give you instant dementia. They first walk left, then right or just stay in the middle. Super frustrating because if you accidentally touch such a pedestrian with the mind of a pigeon you immediately lose your passenger and get a hefty fine. On roads where you are allowed 30 the other drivers are bulging at 15 per hour, your passenger is sometimes better off on foot. Intersections are often blocked because the AI no longer knows who is allowed to drive through first. Really extremely unfortunate because this is such a big part of the gameplay that it directly affects the enjoyment and also our review score a lot.

• Performance | If this was an Uber driver I would give the performance two stars. There is an insane amount of visual pop up. Buildings appear out of nothing and cars pop up in the distance. The biggest problem is the unstable frame rate. Regularly, for no apparent reason, there are serious problems and you have a frame rate that is severely under stress. The game does not look bad and of course there are a lot of elements it has to take into account but it is still unfortunate that there are so many problems.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 16 hours
How long to beat the story? /
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 145 Gamerscore
How long to achieve 1000G | Quite long, as reaching level 25 will take around 40-50 hours.
You’ll love this game if you like these | Simulation games