Crazy Taxi is one of the best arcade games ever made, and it’s one of SEGA’s top games overall, too.  At least I think so.  You drive a taxi and must take customers to their destination as fast as you can, and do crazy stunts along the way for more money!  The money grabbing aspect must’ve been the main focus for the newest in the Crazy Taxi series, as Crazy Taxi: Gazillionaire is one of those mobile endless clickers.  It’s available for iOS and Android devices, but reviewed on iPad here.

Here you don’t drive the taxis, but you are their boss.  You click on passengers in an overhead city setting and tell the drivers to pick them up.  Sometimes you can tap on icons to make the taxis do stunts or multiply your points for a short amount of time.  You can tap on blimps and helicopters for money bonuses as well.  When you earn enough money, you can buy more taxis and hire more drivers and upgrade them both.  The taxis and drivers will be familiar to fans as they are all characters from the original games.  Eventually you can unlock new areas of the city to go to.  And you just repeat the process indefinitely.

Sadly, the game didn’t hold my interest for very long.  Even less than another endless clicker I reviewed: Tap My Katamari, and that one wasn’t very good either.  Really the best thing about this game was they managed to get the original songs from Offspring to play in the background.  It just isn’t Crazy Taxi without ‘em!  But it just made me want to play the original game instead.  You can also earn money when you don’t play, which I found more rewarding.  You know a game is in trouble when it makes you want to play another game and is more interesting when you’re not playing it.

Kid Factor:

While you do see cars crashing into each other, it all looks like Hot Wheels so I think violence is pretty minimal.  Some parents may not like the rebellious nature of the soundtrack, or at least that was a concern of mine when my little brothers wanted to play the original game a long time ago.  But I let them play it anyway and they all turned out OK.  Parental supervision is still definitely recommended for the in-game purchases and ads, though.

Tags: Game Reviews