Crazy Taxi: World Tour is simultaneously more Crazy Taxi, with new maps and the same arcade sensibilities, and a throwback to the extreme sports era of games, with Tony Hawk-style missions sprinkled throughout its large, open cities. It feels like these two styles should be diametrically opposed… and they kinda are, but it still provides a really fun experience. I got to play a relatively early build of the game at a SEGA event featuring the game’s new Germany map, and I think World Tour will deliver exactly what fans want.
The demo plopped me into the open world, where I very quickly began driving some fares around town. This is the typical Crazy Taxi gameplay you’re used to: you pick up a fare, a timer for your round starts, and you try to take as many people to their destinations as you possibly can. Once your timer runs out, you deliver the last fare, your score is tallied, and you just resume exploring the world. You can also cancel the timer at any time by holding down on the d-pad and going off duty.
That’s not the main draw of World Tour, however, it’s the missions spread throughout each map. You start these like you would any other fare, by driving into their little zone and coming to a stop. You get a brief scene between them and whoever you’re playing as, in this case Axel, to explain the mission, and then you’re off to the races. Sometimes literally.
These missions have a wide variety of appropriately Crazy (Taxi) objectives, like launching a thrill seeker as far as you possibly can by coming to a sudden stop, collecting a bunch of paper by running over dumpsters, or getting a man to the airport as quickly as you can while avoiding the cops. Each mission will rate you out of four stars upon completion, with some stars simply depending on how quickly you get to the end and others requiring you to not use turbo boosts or drift for a certain amount of time.
To get 4 stars in all of these, you’re really going to need to master the controls. In terms of basic moves, you’ve got the Crazy Drift, which lets you turn sharply by holding the gas, the bottom face button, and turning left or right. You’ve also got the Crazy Boost and the Crazy Stop. The former will get you up to top speed instantly by holding B then accelerating, while the latter will stop you on a dime by holding B and braking. Performing Crazy Stunts, including those moves and other things like destroying objects on the road or near misses, will increase your Crazy Combo and your Crazy Nitro. Once filled, you can press the Y button to boost for a time, which is always useful.
Of course, all this craziness is accompanied by an excellent soundtrack featuring chiller tunes while just driving around and bands like the Offspring when on a mission or a fare. What’s not great in the audio department is the voice acting; it sounds incredibly awkward and stilted. We do know that AI has been used in the development process, specifically as part of ideation for background objects (for some reason), so I don’t think anything here has been written or voiced by a robot, but it sure does sound like it. It’s trying to go for cheesy, but ends up just sounding weird. We don’t know a release date as of writing, so maybe there’s still time to shore things up on that front.
Still though, Crazy Taxi: World Tour is a blast, and I can’t wait to play more during the network test next month and when it finally releases next year.
Crazy Taxi: World Tour releases in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
