Anyone who has played Crazy Taxi will tell you how much fun driving people around can be. Now you can play as a cab driver on your mobile phone thanks to Taxi!
The basic principle of Taxi! is to pick people up and drive them to their destination in the quickest time possible. To make this a little more interesting, the game is divided into three types of missions. The first, simply called 'Taxi' mode, requires you to pick up a certain number of passengers and take them to their destination within the time limit. You just need to stop close to someone to pick them up, then navigate to their desired destination, which is marked as a red dot on the map.
Next, there's 'Road Rage' mode, in which you need to run over a given number of people in the time limit. The other mission type in Taxi! is 'Time Trial', where you'll be racing through a number of checkpoints before the time runs out.
As you play Taxi! you accumulate money, which you can use to upgrade your car (done via the pause menu). The more expensive the upgrade, the faster the taxi will travel.
The general concept of Taxi! is great, and I love the early-GTA style top-down view. However, the game is rendered virtually unplayable due to its very clunky, unresponsive controls. It seems to take an age to even get your car moving such is the lag on the acceleration. And when you finally do build up a head of speed it takes you so long to slow down that the pedestrian you wanted to pick up will be three blocks behind you once you've ground to a halt. It's difficult to work out which end of the car is which, so sometimes you want know if you're accelerating or reversing.
Granted, this fiddly control mechanism does make Taxi! more challenging, but it becomes so frustrating that you'll want to uninstall it after just a few missions.
Taxi! is a game that sets off in the right direction, but ultimately loses its way.
