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.
Does humanity shine through in what I played earlier this month? I suppose it does, in some ways. World Tour is pretty much exactly what it claims to be, recreating the city-crossing chaos of driving wacky clients around without a care for any obstacle in your path, racing through incoming traffic just to get a second of lead time in a street race, and yeah, when The Offspring comes on as soon as you put your foot on the gas, it’s pretty sick. I don’t think World Tour does much to modernize the formula, but I doubt anyone who wants a new Crazy Taxi game is looking for a Grand Theft Auto-scale open world to drive around, but rather just wants something that feels like a manageable throwback to simpler times.
As genAI encroaches on the video game industry and starts to touch established series, people are going to have to start making tough decisions about what lines they’re willing to cross. Companies that are using the plagiarism machines are trying to move the goal posts for what is an “acceptable” amount of AI use, even as artists are pushing against its use internally. Everyone is learning how they want to use this tech in real time; Sandfall Interactive used the tech to generate certain placeholder assets during the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and has since declared it has no plans to use it again. How many games are we already playing that could be using this tech and we don’t even know it? Crazy Taxi: World Tour is a fun enough time, but is it something I’d knowingly cross those lines for? I have no nostalgic attachment to the series, so no, probably not.