Taxi Chaos 2 review

The original Crazy Taxi is one of SEGA’s cherished arcade-borne successes, with its fusion of a pop-punk soundtrack, reckless driving, and the frantic challenge of shuttling passengers across town. Its allure was rooted in break-neck momentum. Here, every second mattered, every shortcut felt exhilarating, and mastery came from learning the city like a veteran cabbie.

In the decades since SEGA let the franchise grow dormant, only a few imitators have tried to recapture that energy. But none has been able to mimic the meticulously tuned thrills of burning rubber around Bay City. Unfortunately, Taxi Chaos 2 lacks the speed and style that made Crazy Taxi so memorable.

San Valeda, A Town Overtaken by Hostile Waymos

Chaos 2 does a few things right. Rather than simply recreating a mostly flat coastal city, the game delivers an open-world with plenty of verticality. Ramps, rooftops, and working elevators are all traversable thanks to the inclusion of a jump button. Best of all, the ability to launch your taxi in the air lets you soar right over traffic. Like SEGA’s game, there’s an on-screen indicator pointing you toward the next fare or drop off location.

Although ambitious and flaunting distant draw distances, the game’s spacious open-world can be uneven. Being able to chain deliveries across multiple elevations can be rousing, as you’re hopping across rooftops and bouncing through traffic while trying to maintain momentum. But the map lacks the visual clarity that made Bay City readable at high speed. This will lead to missed turns, awkward camera angles, and abrupt dead ends that can punish players. Get stuck by the river and frustration is inevitable.

Leaps Adds Deviation and Sporadically, Disorder

Taxi Chaos 2’s jump mechanic plays a key role, allowing you to launch your vehicle into the air to reach higher platforms or shortcut entire sections of the map. When it works, it feels like an organic extension of the SEGA’s original concept, enabling lithe maneuvering and risky time-saving maneuvers. Too often, however, jumping feels imprecise, with inconsistent physics that can send cars clipping into geometry or falling from platforms.

There’s a good game deep inside Chaos 2, but it’s buried beneath far too much sloppiness. Occasionally, enemy RoboTaxis will box into a corner, forcing a dispiriting reset. Other times, you’ll clip a part of the environment and get your cab stuck like an overturned turtle. And for a game focused on maintaining speed, events like that can suck a lot of fun out of the experience.

Two Drivers, Ten Vehicles Across Three Classes

Taxi Chaos 2 features two playable drivers, Vinnie, an Aloha shirt-clad cabbie, and Cleo, a part time influencer. In execution, the selection feels underdeveloped, with little difference in handling. As such, driver select doesn’t impact how you approach routes or deliveries, which feels like a missed opportunity. Chaos 2’s story mode, following the daily duties of Vinnie, provides light RPG progression through a series of unlocks across a day-to-day career. But shifts are long and dividends come slowly.

Here, progression is rooted in the process of unlocking additional cars, which is one of the game’s most successful hooks. New vehicles do offer noticeable differences in speed, weight, and handling, and earning them provides a sense of reward after a successful run. Unfortunately, some balance issues persist here as well. Some cars are objectively inferior, making them novelties more than anything that’s a viable alternative. Yes, that mini-truck is maneuverable, but it’s an absolute slog on San Valeda’s many climbs.

Not the Trip You Might Have Been Expecting

Technical problems further undermine the experience. Bugs are frequent and varied, ranging from physics glitches, clipping issues, some erratic AI traffic behavior, disappearing navigational clues, and even crashes. Repeated collisions or failed deliveries due to technical faults sap the motivation to keep pushing for higher scores in Arcade Mode.

Although Taxi Chaos 2 hopes to recreate the wild thrills of Crazy Taxi, it feels more like a flawed homage. Its vertical world with cartoonish destruction shows flashes of creativity, but the lack of polish and an assortment of bugs prevent the title from reviving the frenzied thrills of SEGA’s title. As a spiritual successor to a lamentably lapsed franchise, you’ll want to cancel your ride with Taxi Chaos 2 and boot up your Dreamcast instead.

Taxi Chaos 2 was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.