During the Network Test for Crazy Taxi World Tour, we were lucky enough to get a download code to join Axel for a weekend, giving us the chance to bring you a preview of the return of an iconic SEGA title, one that's still finding its footing between tribute and modernity.

We'll start by covering what was available this weekend, the online matches, then move on to our overall thoughts on the game.

Two brand-new game modes

This weekend was our chance to test something new for the Crazy Taxi franchise: online mode, with two game modes. Pickup Race challenges you to drop off a certain number of customers faster than the other players. Cops'n Cabbies pits two police patrol cars against four taxi drivers.

Is six better?

Pickup Race pits you against five other players to drop off customers as fast as possible. The pickup and drop-off zones are the same (give or take a few meters) for every player. In practice, throughout the whole match, which lasts two to three minutes, you're racing shoulder to shoulder with the other players rather than each doing your own thing across town.

This design choice means you're regularly bumper to bumper and jostling with the other cabbies. While mastering the Crazy Dash, Crazy Stop, and drift remains essential, a bit of "strategy" — a big word for it — also comes into play. The game features a nitro gauge that, once full, lets you speed off for a few seconds and ram into your opponents. Hit opponents get "dazed" and slowed down for a few seconds.

It's up to you to decide when to use your nitro: simply to gain precious meters on your rivals, or to save it for defending or attacking when you're close to other players. Suffice it to say that when everyone hoards their nitro, contact moments between cars turn into a joyful mess. Speaking of a joyful mess, during this test phase we found traffic inconsistent: sometimes the roads are empty, sometimes packed, particularly on the German highway, which is tricky to manage in multiplayer. This is compounded by the fact that hitting "NPCs" barely slows you down and carries no real penalty (which is normally the case in solo play, where you lose tips).

Nitro builds up on its own over time, and you can speed up the recharge with jumps, drifts, or by grazing traffic — a bit like in Burnout. Knowing the streets is also essential, since nitro packs are scattered here and there on the road; over time, you'll know exactly where they are and when to use them.

This is all the more true in this test phase since, beyond the two available maps (US West Coast and Germany), only one route per map was available: we always took the same path. A bit more randomness in the routes, or at least more of them, would have been welcome, and we hope that will be the case in the final version.

To wrap up on this mode, we come away torn, for two specific reasons: the fatigue of the lack of routes, undeniably, and the fact that 90% of our matches were played against AI — the ones played with real players only ever gathered two or three humans, filled out with AI — which radically changes the multiplayer experience.

Crazy Taxi remains at heart an arcade scoring game, and here it's trying to add a multiplayer racing dimension without truly capturing the flavor of that genre: the "battles" feel fairly messy, with little stakes or suspense, even if the driving feel is genuinely there. Past a certain rank, we unlocked this same mode with smaller pickup and drop-off zones, which demands solid mastery of the Crazy Stop… but we would have really liked to play against real players to better gauge the developers' intentions.

Catch Me If You Can

Cops'n Cabbies mode pits two police officers against four taxis. The concept is simple and effective: the taxis have a set amount of time to drop off 30 customers between the four of them to win, with each taxi able to carry up to three customers at once. The police must stop them by ramming into them with nitro; after two or three hits, a taxi ends up in jail at the center of the map, and can be freed if another taxi rams into the jail, also using nitro.

Since nitro is a necessity for the police (hits without nitro have no effect on the taxis and cause no damage), their gauge fills up much faster than the taxis'.

Police can win in two ways: imprisoning all four drivers at once, meaning no taxi is left free to release the others, or preventing the cabbies from completing their 30 rides within the time limit. The balance felt pretty solid to us, with victory or defeat coming down to very little more than once — though always against AI.

For both game modes, we had a choice of six car models, grouped into three families: balanced, racing, and what we'll call "heavy." Each offers different stats that, aside from the number of nitro bottles, don't bring about a major gameplay shift — not necessarily a bad thing, as it ensures natural balance.

This choice of barely-differentiated stats actually hides a bigger issue. We came away from these sessions, pleasant as they were, with the feeling that the game wants to do a bit of everything, but ends up doing everything only moderately well. A very personal impression, which I'll break down below.

Roots that are embraced but struggle to take hold

Let's be clear: I enjoyed these sessions, largely thanks to the game's strongest asset, its gameplay. Sure, the controls are simplified: one button is enough to trigger Crazy Dash and Crazy Stop, another to chain fully controlled drifts lasting several seconds.

Another plus is the graphics: we're firmly in early-2000s cartoon style, exactly the image we'd kept in mind of the Crazy Taxi universe. It's colorful, smooth, and some locations have real character, particularly on the US West Coast map.

But there's a catch, especially with the German map, which is German in name only, plus a few signs written in the language. The NPC cars are the same as in the US, so are the customers, and not one of them will drop so much as a little "Danke." The art direction remains very basic: dropping a castle or a Gothic cathedral in the middle of a map isn't enough to give it a German flavor — we could just as easily be in Belgium or any Eastern European country without noticing the difference.

The map lacks soul. Not a huge deal in itself, you might say, but can a game called World Tour really afford that? No. These are details, but nowadays they're exactly what separates an okay game from one that leaves a mark. We don't know the game's other destinations, but imagine an England map without a red phone booth or a double-decker bus, or a France map without a bakery, without so much as a hint of a 2CV on the roads. Yes, it's clichéd, but slapping down a church and a flag won't cut it. On a game called World Tour, we expect to travel, not to drive across maps with flat, generic art direction.

C'est d'autant plus vrai — this is all the more true given that Crazy Taxi 1 and 2 left their mark on me through their American identity, with maps inspired by San Francisco and New York that were clearly part of the game's identity. Would a Crazy Taxi US Tour have been enough? Is it better to play the authenticity card than the variety one? Maybe.

The multiplayer modes leave me with that same aftertaste. The ideas are good, I had fun — but will I spend hours on it? Not as it stands. This is a Network Test, and we likely only got a tiny fraction of the final content, in terms of maps, routes, or match settings. But the real issue lies elsewhere: you can feel the game is still finding itself. You're playing with other players, there's back-and-forth, but is an arcade-built scoring racer really the right fit for that? Maybe with friends on mic, or without AI muddying the multiplayer dimension.

There are still several months of development left, and this was, above all, a stress test. But it's clear the game is still searching for its identity, both in its World Tour dimension and its multiplayer side. Spot-on graphics, the return of Axel and his crew, a few Offspring tracks — all of it will undeniably stir up the nostalgia within us. But will that be enough to keep us glued to the screen for hours, on a game that's fundamentally an arcade title, born for sessions of just a few minutes? That's all I want.

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