Developed/Published by: Hardlight / Sega
Released: July 31th, 2014
Completed: 14th October, 2014
Completion: Unlocked the second island.
Trophies / Achievements: 82/420

I love Crazy Taxi! Love it. In fact, I pretty much love all of Sega’s “experience” arcade games from roughly that era—Top Skater particularly, if you ever played that one—but Crazy Taxi the one that Sega seemed to be most fond of… exploiting (it just made a lot of money, I guess?) it with ports and sequels a go-go, even if some of them have been pretty stinky. And so it’s come to this. A free-to-play iOS game that’s obviously based on Temple Run, rather than, you know, Crazy Taxi. Reduced to a re-skin.

But wait! Supposedly series creator Kenji Kanno was involved! I mean, the game was developed by Hardlight, Leamington Spa-based developer of, uh, Sega’s previous Temple Run re-skin, Sonic Dash, but maybe it’s interesting?

I’ll be frank: I downloaded this thinking I’d play it for literally a few minutes just out of a morbid interest, dash off some words about how you can’t make something free-to-play without considering the context and design of the original game, and call it a day. However, I of course ended up playing this for about two weeks fairly solidly because, of course, free-to-play has to be compelling.

Don’t worry though! Crazy Taxi: City Rush is still crap. I just love Crazy Taxi, I’ve never actually played Temple Run and to be honest, this is probably my first deep time spent with the current brand of “give us your money, give us it now” style of free-to-play, so on some level it was probably just kind of educational.

Not that it’s particularly unique. It’s the usual thing. Everything you do you have to wait to do again. Everything you have to wait for you can spend to speed up. Everything you can buy, you can spend to buy it quicker, or to buy it at all; the really good stuff you want you can never earn enough of the right currency for. You’re always being given offers or special events that, surprise, you have to spend to enjoy or take advantage of. And if you don’t spend anything, you have to watch adverts all the bloody time.

Well, I didn’t spend a penny, in stark contrast to New Star Soccer. I probably would happily have spent a buck to disable adverts, but it started at $2.99 to do that (when you buy some diamonds, or whatever) or $4.99 for a starter pack, and that was too rich for my blood. I put up with the adverts.

The game itself is really—well, at least slightly—interesting as a case study. You’d think that Crazy Taxi would make a perfect translation into free-to-play land, with it basically being a game where you try to survive as long as possible by repeatedly getting fares. In fact, I would have assumed that’s how this game would have worked; move between traffic in a Temple Run style, pick up passengers and take them places, even if it’s just “on rails.” Get hit too much and it’s game over. However, it’s even lesser than that, in that there’s no timer-free “survival” mode. You simply take jobs, say picking up four passengers, from the menu screens, do a quick mission for about 20-30 seconds either succeeding or failing, and you’re done.

It’s really not very much like Crazy Taxi at all? I mean, it absolutely manages to nail that Crazy Taxi look. I wouldn’t have found it as compelling as I did if some receptor in my brain wasn’t telling me I was playing Crazy Taxi even though I plainly wasn’t, on some level. The decision to not use the “endless runner” template seems bonkers considering it was already encoded in the DNA, but if you’re wanting people to be returning to the game over and over, in bits, and feel forced to spend money, it makes more sense to offer such a lame piecemeal experience?

It’s got all the other gating that you’d expect from free-to-play too, with everything needing to be unlocked, your taxi needing to be upgraded, and so on, requiring non-stop grinding to get anywhere (and it’s not transparent about this: the main missions become too hard to compete with from the second one, and you need to basically fully upgrade a taxi to get anywhere.)

Interestingly, though, I really wanted to like this. Temple Run is copied for a reason and Crazy Taxi is a brilliant setting, but what broke my back was actually unlocking the second island, where I was forced to spend my hard-earned cash on a new, totally underpowered car (that I didn’t want) and then told I couldn’t drive my old car on the island. Obviously that’s to force me into the exact same treadmill I was on on the first island—grind, grind grind—but I rather mistakenly believed that the next island would just offer me tougher or longer missions that would (at some point) force me to upgrade to another car. Nope. Just the same boring loop, but now it felt arbitrary and unfair. Strange the things that can put you off, eh?

Will I ever play it again? Nope. Literally just deleted it. Goodbye, all my hard-earned upgrades and 261 diamonds (still not enough to buy the car I wanted, that I could only drive on the first island anyway.)

Final Thought: Kenji Kanno’s involvement on this game was, and I guarantee this, being sent a build at one point and sending back an e-mail with some vague and generally meaningless input. Or he said “you should put Hulk Hogan in the game for weeks and weeks” because that’s what they’ve done for some fuckin’ reason.