Within our new area, in the city itself, popup is much more prominent then it was in either of the first two cities, and there are so many filters being tossed around that slowdown often drops the game almost to a crawl. It works in that the game looks much better, but it also creates huge amounts of slowdown at times, though it’s pretty much regulated to just Oasis. They now sport more lighting effects and filters for the water and lights to give them a more realistic blur. First off, Hitmaker has added all sorts of effects to the game, and to all the cities, not just Glitter Oasis.
Glitter Oasis is our new addition, composed of Las Vegas and some huge canyons, it presents both some of the series best and worst in terms of graphics. Unfortunately, even all this can not hide that the new city is not terribly great. These mini-games aren’t just for fun and learning, as completing them also unlocks the game’s extras. The more obvious skill teachers are in here as well, learning to slide back and forth across platforms, dropping off a set number of customers within a specific timeframe, and so on. You’ll encounter weird objectives like hitting a giant baseball with your car to try and score a homerun to dodging cars on a football field in an attempt for a touchdown. This time we have the Crazy X, composed of 25 funky courses with odd goals.
Of course, without perfecting the skills of movement that won’t be very long, and here is offered yet another collection of mini-games which are both a great distraction from the regular game and help you to really learn how to get things done. After playing a few games, your left thumb will probably hate you for rolling up and down the pad across the buttons for however long you manage to last. The controls respond quickly and beautifully, but the continuous switching back and forth can really wear on your fingers. Among those the most useful is coming to a dead stop in mid-air, great for perfect placement into a destination. You quickly shift through gears to get speed boosts and to perform hairpin turns at any time, and you have various special tricks that can be formed while jumping. These control much differently, offering a faster way to play but offset by looser controls.īy and large, the controls and gameplay remain exactly the same. However, one of the unlockables is the return of the odd extra vehicles, like the bicycle and baby carriage, along with a brand new funky one. The changes are there, each car excels at something different, but it still seems very slight and doesn’t actually affect the gameplay very much. A staple that seems to persist throughout the series is the lack of any real control difference between the cars. Venus’ modified pickup truck looks very odd next to the predominantly low-rider and classic cars, seeing as how it is twice the height of the others, but it does not seem to affect the driving too much.
The cars, however, sport a lot of style and look rather cool (and “TRICKED OUT,” going by Hitmakers expressive love of that word). The new characters are about as generic as the older ones are they’re just placeholders that don’t really do anything. Luckily, this slides right into giving you all the old music as well as new songs, so it also sports the biggest soundtrack of the series yet. Whereas the previous two CT games were a single city each ( CT2 had a smaller version as well), this one brings both of those cities into the mix as well as the new one, basically giving you all three games in one package.
A new city has been brought in as well as four new drivers, and Crazy Taxi 3 also serves as the best game in the series for newcomers as well. The third installment of Sega’s insane taxi series has arrived, and, for better or worse, is more of the same with almost nothing new to gameplay.