This past March, Sega announced a new entry in the beloved Crazy Taxi series which was to be both free to play and exclusive to mobile devices. After a brief soft-launch period, Crazy Taxi: City Rush (Free) is now available worldwide. Now, I’m imagining the arrival of City Rush will be divisive amongst players. On the one hand, Sega has crafted a really good “mobilized" version of Crazy Taxi. It’s sort of like a Temple Run game, in that it’s behind the back and you auto-accelerate, but you also can choose your own routes through the cities, so it feels less restrictive and more open. It can be played in either portrait or landscape orientation, and visually City Rush just pops with color and style. It’s a very bright and happy game. There are also loads of customization options, from a massive fleet of different taxis to unlock to tons of visual customizations as well as ability upgrades for each.
On the other hand, though, this isn’t the Crazy Taxi you know and love from the Dreamcast era. Gone is the absolute panic that you’d get by having just a few seconds left on the clock to deliver a passenger, and the amazing feeling you’d get by crashing through traffic, jumping over obstacles, and basically doing anything in your power to get them there on time, and succeeding. The franticness of the original Crazy Taxi is what I think made it so enjoyable, and while that’s still present somewhat in City Rush, it’s definitely not as extreme. The other major bummer with City Rush is just how free to play it is. Two in-game currencies and a fuel meter are present. If you’re ok dealing with similar free to play games then you’ll be fine here too, just expect some downtime when you’re waiting for your fuel gauge to refill and lots of grinding for in-game currencies to buy all the nifty upgrades and stuff.
It’s a shame because, like I said, I think Sega have crafted a really neat mobile take on the Crazy Taxi series. But I think a lot of folks will be turned off by the free to play system. Then again, what do I know? Free to play games top the charts all the time, so perhaps City Rush will indeed find a massive audience because at its heart it’s definitely a fun and accessible game. But old-school Crazy Taxi fans will likely have a harder time warming up to this modern take. The silver lining of course is that the original Crazy Taxi (Free) is available on iOS, and it’s a really great port, so if you’re jonesing for the original you can still play it in all its glory. At the very least, both newbies and long-time Crazy Taxi fans should give City Rush a spin for free, and you can find more discussion about the game from players in our forums.
