I was initially excited to play Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator since it reminded me a bit of my childhood. See, I had gotten my GameCube the day after Christmas in 2001, and because my brother and I had pooled our Christmas money to get it, we didn’t have anything left over for games. But a few days later, on New Year’s Eve, we went to our local Blockbuster and rented Crazy Taxi and spent the whole night in a sugar and chip-fueled ecstasy with Sega’s chaotic taxi sim.
Now, as a rule, I approach any game with the word “simulator” tacked onto the end with a healthy degree of skepticism. While Euro Truck Simulator did become a bit of a phenomenon, several hacks on Steam have attached it to unfinished, half-baked games at some attempt or irony—á la your DEEEER Simulator, Goat Simulator, YouTuber Simulator, or any number of shlock that shows up when you type “simulator” into Steam.
But Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator looked to be a reasonably honest attempt at creating an actual simulation of driving a Taxi—though not as crazily as one might have hoped. What’s on display is a, frankly, shocking degree of accuracy combined with a somewhat amateurish delivery that left me somewhat conflicted.
In Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, you take on the role of a taxi driver in Barcelona. That’s pretty much all there is to it. You’ll tour the city, taking people where they need to go and slowly improving your vehicle and your skills as a driver. I suppose since this is a simulation game, you can invent a story for your character. Maybe he’s a reclusive loner who’s slowly becoming more and more disconnected from society, prowling the city at night and dreaming of ridding the scum off the streets.
But where Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator exceeds is in its gameplay. This game is aggressively authentic in how you control your car, which really hooked me. Simple things like needing to physically start the car before driving, removing the parking brake, and signalling at every turn add a layer of authenticity to the driving, but it’s little things that really enhance the experience. Being able to control the windows, air conditioning, radio, turn on collision detection or control the read-view camera gets about as close to feeling like you’re driving a car without needing to drive a real car.
“…Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator looked to be a reasonably honest attempt at creating an actual simulation of driving a Taxi—though not as crazily as one might have hoped.”
Of course, there’s the basic gameplay of picking up potential fares and driving them where they need to be, but there’s a certain degree of nuance to it as well. Naturally, driving properly will affect how well you do and whether fares give you decent tips like obeying the speed limit, stopping at traffic lights, and avoiding collisions, but there are also small things that can increase your potential earnings.
Every fare has a certain degree of patience—based on how long the drive is taking or whether you are driving erratically—which acts as a certain time limit. While the player is given a GPS, knowing how to avoid traffic or find shortcuts will help players profit. But there are interesting layers added to the gameplay that are also beneficial.
Around Barcelona, there are a number of monuments and points of interest that players can visit and document. Every now and again, fares will make conversation with you, and knowledge of these places can help direct the conversation in an interesting and enjoyable direction, increasing potential tips and making the drive more pleasant. It adds a unique incentive to driving around the city, getting to know the streets and improving your skills.
However, it’s not a completely flawless experience. On a technical level, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is a bit of a mixed bag. This can range from bizarre logic issues, where drivers don’t really adhere to the rules of the road or drive in a believable way to myriad technical issues that severely damped the engagement of this so-called “simulation.”
Some of the few I’ve encountered while playing range from fares exiting the car and immediately walking into a wall for a prolonged period of time, pedestrians crossing the street and freezing in place for a few frames, cars that just stop in the middle of the road for no discernable reason, and my personal favourite when a fare enters the car, and people materialize to fill the entire car.
There were some notable performance issues, however. While it runs at a fairly consistent 60fps, every few minutes, the game will freeze for a second or two—likely loading in parts of the map and things to populate it with. It becomes incredibly noticeable since, like I said, when, for the most part, while you’re playing, it runs stable. But it makes it hard to navigate things like changing lanes, turning properly, or even stopping at red lights when the game freezes for a second and halts your sense of movement and control.
“Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is an extremely chill experience that is very easy to lose yourself in.”
Visually, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator isn’t bad, but it’s not as good as it could be for a game of this small scope. Having never been to Barcelona, I can’t say how authentically they mapped the city, but it certainly feels genuinely European with narrow, winding streets and a kind of Mediterranean vibe. Although, despite having never been, I’m fairly certain there are more than the same five identical people there, and they wear more than one outfit.
Furthermore, environmental details while, again, not terrible, fail to impress beyond what you’d get from a high-end Xbox 360 game or maybe a mid-range PS4 game—I’m just saying Grand Theft Auto V came out in 2013, and this doesn’t look markedly better than that. A lot of attention has been put into the Taxi model and a decent amount in every other car on the road, but there’s a certain lack of attention to detail. If you crash into another car, you’ll definitely do some damage, but it’s incredibly subdued—the dents are there, but cars don’t crumple the way they do in real life, or even something like GTA.
Also, and this might just be a nitpick, but it kind of feels like the lighting engine is a bit on a whack. The way the light hits certain roads feels so over-exposed that it looks like you’re driving on a stream of hot magma. This can also make it somewhat difficult to see road markings like lane lines and sometimes speed limits—which can result in a ticket, if exceeded.
However, all that said, when it works, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is an extremely chill experience that is very easy to lose yourself in. It’s one of those perfect “podcast games” where you don’t need to worry about extreme action or intense drama—just throw on your favourite podcast, go with the flow, follow the rules and vibe with it. Hopefully, some optimization patches can get it where it needs to be.
