Crazy Taxi: World Tour is hard to write a preview about because it’s the kind of game that rebuffs any attempt at critical thought. It is stupid, silly, and deeply unconcerned with pontifications about how it captures a certain early-2000s, Jackass-esque attitude to stunts and humor. Any attempts at thinking about it too hard are immediately cut off by Dexter Holland yelling “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” in The Offspring’s “All I Want” booming from the taxi’s speakers.
“Isn’t it fun to drive around towns doing odd jobs for wacky characters who exist to give you the most absurd reason to drive them around like a maniac in your indestructible taxi cab?” the game asks. “Hell yeah, brother,” the average person replies. “Is it enough to make you forget that Sega is implementing generative AI into its workflow?” it asks in a slightly quieter voice. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” the longtime fan who’s been waiting for the series to come back for 20 years responds at a much louder volume.
The unfortunate truth is that regardless of how much World Tour scratches that nostalgic itch, it’s got a cloud hanging over its roads that a frankly niche series like this didn’t need. Crazy Taxi has been gone for a long time, and whatever the perceived benefits of using genAI in the concepting phase may be, they can’t possibly be outweighed by the reputation hit. But nevertheless, Sega has used it, and claims that everything you actually see in the game is going to be human-made.
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