Review — Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator

Explore Barcelona and build your own taxi empire in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator.

Tired of the bad weather and yearning for sunnier places, but don’t have the finances or the time? Not to worry, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator takes you to swirling Barcelona where you get to drive around as a cab driver and will be able to build your own cab empire. Whether this simulator is as relaxing as a vacation is, of course, another question.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is the latest game in Nacon’s Life series, a collection of light simulation games that also includes Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator, Hotel Life: A Resort Simulator and Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator. Taxi Life was developed by Poland’s Simteract, the studio that was also already responsible for Train Life: A Railways Simulator, and so here they trade the railroad for cab life in one of Europe’s most touristic cities. Moreover, the creators promise that Barcelona was recreated 1:1 but don’t ask me if I would know my way around the city after playing this game.

Behind the Wheel

As the title suggests, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator tries to evoke a more or less authentic feeling of driving around a city and the service of a cab. The only game I’ve already played that somewhat draws on this was Bus Simulator, but of course operating a bus is still something different than operating a cab. Once you start the game and choose your character, first and foremost, you get to take your driving test again (while learning the game’s controls, of course). If you pass it, then you can go out into the busy city and look for the first victims to whom you want to show off your driving skills. Your passenger are divided into different types of difficulty, depending on a number of factors such as the ride, whether they have certain wishes, or their patience. After all, if you drive badly and flout traffic rules, their patience drops and they are less likely to be satisfied with the ride and thus tip you off, let alone end the ride early.

Once you have acquired enough money, you can start building your empire. With your hard-earned pennies, you can buy new cabs and hire other drivers. Each driver has a certain daily rate and an advantage and disadvantage. Once you hire someone, you need to assign him or her a cab, a shift and a neighborhood. Slowly, you will hopefully see your business grow and your capital increase. If a driver is not profitable enough, you fire him just as easily as you hired him, long live liberal capitalism! There is a hard stop to the growth of your business though, because your garage can only accommodate fifteen cabs. Fortunately, you can have some variety in your garage, ranging from a small town car and a hatchback to an electric minivan and a luxury sedan. There is also some car maintenance involved, where you can not only customize your cars, but you will also have to repair damage, refuel or recharge, and even clean them from time to time, for example.

Missed opportunity

Once you dive into the management part, you will notice that it is unfortunately a bit too superficial. More than the above mentioned choices are not really involved, making the added value of this part rather minimal. If you are looking for an in-depth management game, you better look elsewhere. Fortunately, the driving part itself is more interesting, as you have quite a lot of control over the various facets of your car. The controls themselves are also solid, but the experience does seem to me to be many times better with a steering wheel than with a controller.

Driving around Barcelona can be really relaxing, especially since the city is quite handsomely recreated. Graphically the game is not an outlier, you will soon notice that from the NPCs walking around the city. But the city itself and the cars certainly look good. Moreover, the city is peppered with monuments and graffiti that you can collect, and there is even a leveling system present in the game, where you can unlock new perks via a skill tree, such as the ability to lower the cost of your drivers, cancel daily traffic tickets or make you fill up faster. All of this actually makes for the most interesting part of this cab event.

Were it not for the fact that the game suffers from quite a few problems. The first problem you will notice pretty quickly as soon as you start driving: every few seconds the image hangs for a while. This is terribly distracting, especially when you are just running, and unfortunately the developer has not yet been able to fix this. Furthermore, the A.I. of pedestrians and other drivers is, at times, petulant. The number of drivers who drive through red lights is not normal and I have also seen cars take a turn at full speed only to crash into a wall. Pedestrians then cross the pedestrian crossing, for example, only to turn around several times and cross the pedestrian crossing again. Also, the pop-up in this game is quite blatant and you won’t be surprised to see cars or pedestrians suddenly pop up out of nowhere in front of you. By the way, I’m still searching for an explanation as to why there were suddenly three people in my car when I was only picking up one customer.

Clearly, Taxi Life could have used a few more months of development time, and perhaps it would have been better to release this game in early access after all. Now it actually feels like an early access game where there are still a lot of bugs and glitches and a lot of features missing. You will probably be able to get some fun out of it, especially since the glitches are sometimes painfully hilarious, but this fun will be rather short-lived. Partly because the game gives you few goals to work toward, outside of buying new cars and accessories for them. Too bad the game does not have more to offer the player and is not better finished.

2,5/5

Reviewed on PlayStation 5.
This review was originally published on BeyondGaming.be.