Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator

Taxi Life has so much promise, but in its current state it’s extremely hard to enjoy. Some menu options still have Xbox buttons assigned to them – press A, we were told. One accident we were in saw our car flipped onto its back (maybe the road rage had gotten to us at that point), and we had to quit the game and reload just to be able to move the taxi again. The lack of polish feels evident throughout the game, and it’s a real shame, because the concept is a compelling one.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is a pretty addictive new addition to the genre, but it's giving us a rough ride at launch. It does the basics well for the most part, and features an impressively large and detailed version of Barcelona to cruise around in, but the unintelligent AI drivers, poor performance and various other irritations are significant drawbacks. This has all the potential to be a good (or even great) game, but it's going to take a few patches to get there.

If you're looking for a deep, well-rounded driving simulator with a career mode, then Taxi Life is going to fall short on all accounts. There are a variety of similar titles available that do everything that Taxi Life offers and do so much more competently. Taxi Life can look pretty at times, but it's a big ask to overlook its many bugs and short-comings. Driving a taxi around a city isn't the most interesting idea to begin with, so Taxi Life needed to get all the details right, and unfortunately it doesn't come close to doing so.

It’s neither fun nor terrible, but rather simply bad – and bad in a way that never quite makes the jump into guilty pleasure/so-bad-it’s-good terrible.

Taxi driving in Barcelona looks good. Unfortunately, it's also the first and last positive thing we can say about this game. As soon as you pass a few kilometers, the enthusiasm dissipates like steam over a pot.

Taxi LIfe: A City Driving Simulator is a really good idea for a game ruined by a lack of goals, bad area design, optimisation issues, and awful controls.

Taxi Life becomes another addition to the long line of unpolished simulators. Barcelona may be a lovely city entire of sun, but a strange driving model, monotonous conversations with passengers, and repetitive tasks ruin the overall experience. A little more effort could have made the final game much better. Right now, though, it is an experience meant only for actual city driving enthusiasts.

Taxi Life could have been a marvellous experience if it had been able to realise the simulation it promised efficiently. As it stands now, it leaves us unenthusiastic and leads to existential crises.

The core game on offer with Taxi Life is decent if not great and the game undoubtedly has potential to improve. It’s just really not there yet and could have benefitted with more time in the oven rather than releasing in a poor state and patching it after the fact.

Although there are many positives to the game, I do believe that some of the negatives outweigh these. It cannot be said that the developers don't care. Within the first couple of days since the release, the developers have already made updates which has taken on board some of the issues highlighted. The main issue I have with the game is the longevity, and how much this game can offer. And unfortunately, I do not see this as a game I would often go back to. And this is echoed by many of the players thus far.