As an OG Crazy Taxi lover, its new remake might just not be crazy enough

I've played just about every damn iteration of Crazy Taxi there is. My first exposure to it was the PlayStation 2 EyeToy version included in Sega Superstars, which involved me wildly gesticulating and yelling in order to get Axel's attention. Yes, for some reason you are the passenger in the EyeToy version of Crazy Taxi. I don't know either.

Then I spent a fair bit of time behind the wheel in both its Dreamcast and arcade versions—we don't talk about the myriad of mobile travesties—so I was pretty jazzed about the announcement of Crazy Taxi: World Tour. I was promptly un-jazzed by all the generative AI discourse that mired the hours following its reveal trailer, but you know.

(Image credit: Sega)

Allegedly its use remains firmly in the conceptual stages of development, which I still don't love, but I was determined to not let that cloud my opinion of the game as I sat down to give it a whirl at Gamescom. And honestly? After an hour, I kinda felt like that was all the time I needed with Crazy Taxi: World Tour. As much as I wanted to be sold on a modern-day iteration, I'm just not quite there yet.

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My time with the demo popped me behind the wheel as Crazy Taxi poster boy Axel, and dropped me into its thematically-appropriate Germany map. There'll be five cities with the full release, but I imagine most of what I saw in the game's amalgamation of various German cities will be true of the rest of the game.

The traditional Crazy Taxi time-attack style of picking up and dropping off as many passengers as possible is still here, and can be initiated at pretty much any time by stopping in their vicinity. Arguably the more fun part of World Tour, though, are the various side quests and challenges you can undertake. I stumbled (or coasted, I guess) past one that required me to drive around with a whole bunch of pizzas stacked in my back seat, while another one had an adrenaline junkie tag along as I drove off a huge ledge at high speed before coming to a breaking stop below, launching them into the air.

(Image credit: Sega)

Each of these challenges comes with a star rating slapped onto them—the better I perform, the higher the rating. Pretty simple stuff. The problem is, beyond that, I didn't actually find driving around in Crazy Taxi all that fun. Drifting doesn't quite have that juice to it, and handling feels a lot tighter than it did in the original game, but that's to its detriment.

I also just don't love the way Crazy Taxi: World Tour looks. It has this awfully cheap quality to it, one that feels devoid of any real identity. It doesn't have that wonderful cartoonishness of the original that I'd immediately recognise as a game from Sega's catalogue. It looks like the kind of game that had generative AI heavily involved in its conceptual process. Which as we've already established, it does.

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World Tour includes the zany Offspring songs of the original, real-life brands (the Puma store is back in World Tour) and Axel's wild green spiky 'do, but it's wrapped up in an utterly sauceless presentation, one that not even a relatively impressive recreation of Cologne's gothed-out-the-wazoo cathedral can save.

It sucks, because I would absolutely persevere through Crazy Taxi's duller driving portions in favour of seeing it bring real-world locations to life, but as it stands? I'm just not feeling it. I'll be keeping a watchful eye from the sidewalk, but I'm certainly not itching to hop back into the driver's seat of this Crazy Taxi any time soon.