I love a design pitch that speaks to me personally. Mile High Taxi is Crazy Taxi mixed with the neverending cityscape of Star Wars’ Coruscant, tasking you with flying between immense high-rises and earning money like Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element. If that sounds like the best possible combination to you too, then you need to strap in – it’s going to be a crazy ride!
Mile High Taxi pits you as a taxi driver in the futuristic skies, nipping and zipping through the bustling sky lanes to get your passenger to their destination. Pick one of three drivers – one of whom boasts a shock of Sega-bothering green hair – and take your floating yellow cab out for a spin.
You can opt for Standard mode which is the classic Crazy Taxi-style passenger pick-up mode. Get your charges to their destination as quickly as possible and earn more money the faster you do it. They’ll leap into your taxi, laugh, grumble, tell you stories as well as letting you know where they’re going, with the only downside being that it doesn’t feel like there’s a particularly long list of unique spoken lines for them to say.
If you’re struggling to get far here you might want to check out Free Roam where you can check out the city without fear of those pesky customers and their need to go places. This is all well and good, but the city isn’t really that different, with few landmarks that you can really use to navigate by. You’ll most use the directional arrow to your destination, and if your passenger has said what floor they’re on you’ll have a pretty decent sense of where you’re heading.
The freshest mode is Sequential, where you have to pick up and drop off customers in a set sequence, levelling up once you’ve dropped enough customers off and progressing through to futurisitic taxi driver fame. It’s an interesting twist on the formula, and it feels like one that could be built upon even further.
Your job sees you working with a gruff, and slightly gangster-like, dispatcher in the shape of Bones who tasks you with working the 600th to the 650th floor. He’s very clear on that, so best not to upset him. Try to head out of your area and the screen will start to flash red, so you need to swiftly turn around and head the other direction. He’ll let you know when there are upgrades available, and when you run out of time he tells you you’re fired. This is about as far as the narrative goes in Mile High Taxi, but it doesn’t really need anything else.
This is Crazy Taxi in the sky, and that design brief brings with it a few snags that were part of that game’s DNA. Firstly, stopping in the loading and unloading areas can be problematic. You often overshot them in the original game, so adding a vertical axis to that can accentuate the issue if you’re not being careful and precise. The areas are quite forgiving, locking your craft into place with some leeway, but not if you’re underneath the destination rather than on top of it.
It’s also not quite so frantic. The Standard mode obviously aims to ape the original’s arcade roots, but with a longer opening time limit you’re always able to get a number of drop-offs done before the timer really starts to bother you. I’d like to see it chopped down, giving you an immediate sense of urgency, because it’s otherwise really close to capturing that special Crazy Taxi feel.
The other thing that just needs tuning a little is the taxi’s drifting when cornering. At the moment it feels too tight and controlled, and doesn’t respond like you’d expect something that’s floating in the sky to. You can zoom about quite happily without it, but I love the drama that a ridiculous drift brings with it. Alongside that, it really needs a grading system to give you something more tangible to take away from each session. With these tweaks in place, I think Mile High Taxi could truly wear the ‘Crazy Taxi Spiritual Successor’ title with pride.
