Super Taxi Driver

The Good
Super Taxi Driver is a pretty direct imitation of SEGA's Crazy Taxi arcade game on a much smaller scale. That's understandable since it was programmed pretty much by one guy. And I must admit that for a while it is actually quite fun to drive around in!

As a big fan of racing and driving games, I have played a lot of titles of this genre. I find that most often, what kills the low-budget racing games is their bad driving physics. They are quite simply what makes any racing game fun. If the vehicles don't behave realistically, or reasonably so, the game will feel unfair and just not be much fun to play at all. I was quite surprised then to see that Super Taxi Driver's driving mechanics are actually quite good. Of course it helps that it is supposed to be an arcade-like game, and is supposed to feel exaggerated. The way your car rocks back and forth when you accelerate or hit the brakes, the way the tail breaks out and skids around wildly, it never feels unnatural, just like really wild driving. The way your driver character is animated helps too, holding the wheel with one hand, the other arm casually dangling out the window. It's fun even just to watch.

There are six different city layouts with their own visual style, which you will cycle through over and over again for as long as you can keep the timer from running out. Of course, the quicker you drop off your passengers at their destinations, the more money and bonus time you earn. Money helps you only in getting to the top of the high score table. But not earning enough bonus time due to a customer giving you a bad rating can put your progress in jeopardy, since it might not even compensate you for the time it took you to complete the job.

Technically, the game looks and sounds okay, but isn't overwhelming. The textures are unsophisticated and the viewing distance is short, although it doesn't negatively affect gameplay. The music is cute at first, but since the 4-minute track will repeat over and over again throughout the game, it will start to bother you very quickly. There are more music tracks in the game's installation directory, which for some reason are never used. The voice samples of your customers are so bad they're funny. They (men and women alike) were obviously recorded by one person at home, which makes them incredibly cheesy in a charming way. Altogether the game feels more like a pet project some of your friends hacked together in their spare time, which is fine by me as long as it's priced appropriately.

The Bad
The main points of criticism are flaws in the game mechanics that would have been so easy to fix. First of all, what is especially disappointing when comparing the game to its big role model, is that there are only four passengers per stage (which are at the same time the only pedestrians around), and that it is always predetermined which one you have to pick up next. No cruising around town to choose a fare, and deciding between longer and shorter jobs for any given situation. Whether you are picking up or dropping off, the arrow at the top of the screen always tells you exactly where to go. It unnecessarily reduces the game to a simple waypoint race.

Possibly worst of all, the game's collision detection is horrible. It works fine with traffic, once you get used to the fact that crashing into another car will almost always bring you to a complete halt. The problem is with the city layout though. All stages are made up from square tiles, which by the way doesn't go a long way towards making the cities very interesting or distinct. There are roads and open fields that you can pass through, and there are tiles with buildings or trees on them. Irritatingly, the last two are surrounded by invisible barriers. This makes the tree fields a real disaster. Even if there's only two trees near the center of the tile, the whole tile is surrounded by the same invisible, impenetrable barrier. Even with more than enough space between, or next to, the trees for you to pass through, the whole tile cannot be entered because of this barrier. It is extremely confusing to say the least, and takes away a lot of the appeal of finding shortcuts. You will constantly have to try and make out which tile a tree belongs to, so you know where you can and cannot pass. I want to blast through the cities at insane speeds and blaze my own trail, not have to deduce the underlying geometry of the level.

Also, while the game's documentation states that some passengers prefer wild rides and others want a safe journey, I could not decide whether this is not really true, or whether it's just that the effect this has on job ratings is so nontransparent. Sometimes, you will get a perfect run at maximum speed and be given the worst rating. At other times, you will get the best rating for an embarrassing accumulation of crashes and involuntary detours. But the reactions of the passengers to your driving seem to be the same for every one. And if it is impossible to deduce what kind of driving style is most appropriate for a given passenger, then the whole feature could have just as well been left out altogether.

Finally, something is badly broken about the way bonus cars are handled in the game. For every three stages you complete, the message "Bonus Car" will be displayed on the high score table. However, none of these cars are ever actually awarded to you. The cab selection screen will never give you more choices than the initial three. While the high score table shows some of the default entries to have been achieved with one of the bonus cars, this not even works for your three basic cabs, meaning that your own high score will always show the same car, regardless of which one you actually used. This is definitely true for the version released in Europe, and I suppose if it ever worked in other versions, the publisher would have released a patch for the other ones, which they never did. This is disappointing, since it would have been the only sense of progress in the game. All you can do then is replay the same stages with the same vehicles until you get bored.

The Bottom Line
Given its lack of replayability and rewards, Super Taxi Driver probably shouldn't have been released as a retail game. It would be okay as a low-price Shareware game to pass some time during a break, similar to today's casual games market. Also, the fact that several elements of the game are either broken or feel unfinished, it seems very likely that the game was released too early by the publisher. As it is, it can be fun to drive around for a bit every now and then, but ultimately it ends up a well-meant attempt at a PC arcade racer that could have profited a lot from just a little more time in development and testing.