Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars

"If you already own the first two Crazy Taxi games, keep them and give this a miss."

9 years ago, a game was released in the arcade named Crazy Taxi. In the game, you would race around a fictional city at breakneck speed, picking up customers and earning insane amounts of money by performing combos aka "tricks" and getting them to their destination quickly. This game was soon released later on the Dreamcast and became a smashing success.

A few years later, a sequel came out called- you guessed it- Crazy Taxi 2. This game had you driving around a real American city- New York, or the Big Apple, and a smaller city named the Small Apple. This game had added features such as a "crazy hop", which allowed you to make the car jump while driving, and the ability to now pick up more than one customer at a time. Like the first game, which had a set of mini-games available, likewise was the same with this game. Beating these modes would give you special bikes to use along with the standard cab. While both of these were solid, above average games on their own, not so are the games on this compilation.

Graphics: 4/10

Downright awful. Not only are there frequent slowdowns in the game, the camera performs like it was designed by a six-year-old. Very often in the game, there will be very odd graphics that clash with the rest of the game and big black backgrounds that block your path and sometimes even lead you to crash into buildings. The PSP is capable of such more more than this crap but it wasn't used to its full potential in this game. Whoever designed these camera angles must have been drunk at the time or blissfully unaware of what they were designing.

Sound: 7/10

Most of the same sound effects are here that were on the original games, but they don't sound as good. Sometimes audio cues are late but to help make up for it the producers gave both titles a better, revamped soundtrack. The customers still hurl insults at you when you mess up, which gets annoying and is overused. Had that been worked on, this category definitely would have scored higher.

Gameplay: 6/10

This coincides with everything else that makes this game so bad. Everything included from the first two games is intact, but is marred by the terrible sound effects and graphics. If both of those were as good as the originals, this would've gotten a 10, hands down. The original gameplay was great and brilliantly designed, not so here.

Control: 10/10

The only outstanding category in the entire review. The controls are nice and tight and work perfectly with the PSP controls. This is the one part of the game that I have no problems with.

Replay Value: 4/10

Even if you enjoy playing this the first couple of times, even slightly, you'll get frustrated by all the issues surrounding this game and will not want to come back to it very often. Don't expect much from this game at all.

Buy/Rent: Skip it altogether. Buy something worthwhile, like a Need for Speed Game or the original Crazy Taxi games. Listen to my advice- you'd thank me for it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/29/09

Game Release: Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars (US, 08/07/07)