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

Crazy Taxi isn’t quite what it once was. Last years Crazy Taxi: City Rush saw a dumbing down of the core gameplay & the inclusion of free-to-play elements. It was not a good game, making many of the mistakes free to play games often do (greed over gameplay). You can read our review of City Rush here.

Now we have the next step in the evolution of Crazy Taxi with the horribly titled, Crazy Taxi: Gazillionare. Any semblance of actual gameplay has been removed & replaced with basic screen tapping. That’s all you need to do…tap the icons on screen & your taxis will just go, pick up the person & drop them off. No input needed from the player…real crazy huh?

The selling point of Crazy Taxi: Gazillionare is the collectable side of things. There are a large amount of different taxi drivers to unlock. As you complete tasks more become available & can then be bought & put on the road to start earning money for you.

The map is split into locations, 12 in total with more & more drivers available to take to the roads of each area & bring in the cash. Cash is then used in a number of ways with the two main ways being buying new drivers & upgrading their taxis. New & better drivers bring in higher fares while upgrading taxis sees an increase in money earned per minute.

It won’t take long before you’ve got a load of drivers zipping around the map picking up cash galore. When not playing the game, money will still come in. Loading it up after a period of time will see you net huge amounts that can be instantly doubled by watching a short ad.

In fact there are a number of ways you can boost your progression by watching an ad here & there. Simple stuff & completely understandable seeing as it’s a free to play. What isn’t so understandable is the in-app purchases. Strap yourself in, it’s about to get real bumpy.

There are two currencies: cash & gems. As stated above, cash is used to do pretty much everything. However things get pricey very quickly. After having not played the game in over 30 hours I had earned about 132,000 dollars. It sounds like a lot however to upgrade the last driver you unlock for the Glitter Marina area costs over 79,000 dollars. That’s from level 1 to level 2. Each level costs more with level 2 to level 3 costing over £85,000.

Wanna hire the first driver of West of the Park? That’s over £720,000. How about the first driver of The Bourghs? That will be over 310 trillion dollars. It just keeps getting higher & higher. To unlock all the drivers without dropping a penny of real money into the game will takes months. Months of tapping on the screen. That’s it. There isn’t any deeper gameplay then that!

Gems are used to to get boosts in cash or ‘cash from the future’. 250 gems will give you the equivalent of 3 days cash. They come in 3 forms, 80 for £1.99, 500 for £9.99 & 1,100 for £19.99. As you can see the nearest amount to getting 3 days worth of cash would cost £9.99. That’s a seriously high asking price & for a game that offers very little gameplay. It’s even worse when you consider the original game is free to download now & to remove all non-Sega ads costs £1.99.

Is there any question about where you’re money should be spent? The screen clicking sub-genre is being to really take hold now & games like Crazy Taxi: Gazillionaire aren’t helping.