Game Review: Crazy Taxi: City Rush (Mobile – Free to Play)

I spent no real money while playing Crazy Taxi: City Rush. I played it for for around 3 weeks. I reached level 14 with 919 customers reaching their destinations in total.

So City Rush is the first Crazy Taxi to go with the free to play model & it seems like a good deal…at first.

The first things you notice in City Rush is that it retains the bright & colourful graphical side of the Crazy Taxi games. Once you’re set-up with your first taxi (basic model) you enter your first area of the city (of which there are 4) to start gaining some fares & collecting some cash.

Downtown is the only area available to you at first & fares range in difficulty (noticeable by the colour bar above their heads). Once you’ve selected the fare & entered the city you gain control of your taxi…kind of. You have no control over your taxi beyond moving lanes, turning corners, hitting a boost button & stopping in the drop-off area.

You move lanes by swiping left or right, hold the direction you want to turn, push the boost button & tap on the brake once you’ve reached the drop-off area. Other vehicles are hazards & serve to slow you down so moving between lanes is key. There are also collectibles that give you more money dotted amongst the vehicles.

Your route is marked out with an arrow that is easy to follow. The game suggest that you should explore the city to find the quickest routes but that is something that just isn’t possible. Why? The time-limit for almost all the fares is extremely tight…even the easiest fares are often only completed with a second or 2 to spare. Exploration is not possible if you want to complete the fare.

Your taxi is upgradable in a number of ways: tires (stops wheel-spin), boost capacity (allows more boosting), boost power (more powerful & longer boosts), engine level (increases top speed) & body level (stronger car). All of these combined will make the fares easier but not in a way that is instantly noticeable. Maxing everything out on a cab can be very expensive with some of the latter upgrades costing 40,000+ coins or 80+ diamonds.

This brings me to the currency options…

There are 2 available in Crazy Taxi: City Rush…the main one is gold coins. These are earned in through customers dropped off, tank destruction missions (a strange one), daily checkpoint races & mystery trunk unlocks (I will explain more about that).

An easy fare can gain you between 1,500 & 4,000 gold coins at one time while a tank mission (bear in mind these are time-limited) can net you 10,000+. It isn’t possible to just keep doing fares racking up the coins either as your fuel is limited (5-6 fares) before you need to re-fuel…this is done by waiting, watching a video or paying diamonds.

As you might expect Diamonds are the premium currency, your number is limited & they are difficult to obtain. You can gain these by meeting new characters, unlocking the mystery trunk & earning achievements in-game. You are rewarded with very little & a new character can set you back 150 diamonds at a minimum.

You can of course choose to use real money to help you along your way. £1.99 will get you 15,000 coins or 300 diamonds or if you’re a big spender £69.99 will get you 1 million coins or 16,500 diamonds. It’s standard stuff in most free-to-play games so I’m not really that outraged even if a new beach taxi does cost you 850 diamonds.

I advise you not to pump any real money into this game more because it is extremely light on content. You will find yourself replaying the same fares in the same areas over & over again just so you can improve your taxi slightly or customise its look (expensive to do also). There is no variety beyond the tank mission & that doesn’t make any sense. It’s light on options with even the mystery trunk unlocks reliant on random drops during your fares.

You’ll find yourself getting bored very quickly…

City Rush also happens to have an extremely poor soundtrack of very few songs…all in the vein of pop-rock. Thankfully though you can set-up your own music to play during the fares but as most are over within a minute or 2 it doesn’t really matter.

The game also has a worldwide ranking system if you care for that sort of thing…

Not even close to the worst free-to-play game I’ve put time into but certainly one of the most boring. It is almost unforgivable that there is next to no freedom to explore (regardless of what the game tries to tell you). It doesn’t take long either for the pay wall to quickly come up.