+

Very well made arcade game. As soon as you plug it in, the game starts, and you're picking up people, speeding around town, and dropping people off. The cars and things that fly around, the cartoonish rebellious edge in most of Sega's games and the punk music soundtrack that supports it, the environment that is built with distorted highs and lows that speed around you... the game is very kinetic and rewards you instantly as soon as you pick up the controller. There is a wacky zaney WOW factor that sucks you in instantly, and keeps you there for awhile.

Both a regular mode and challenge mode give the game variety. In challenge mode there are a variety of unique challenges, all with their own amazing thing.

Well balanced intuitive controls. The steering moves just right, the jumps are set just right, the environment doesn't trap you or work against you most of the time, and the controls are pretty much self-explanatory and take less than ten seconds to figure out.

-

Severely lacking in depth. There is no plot, story, characters, multiplayer, almost no challenges, and basically no incentive to keep playing. You just select the stage you want, and drive people around until it gets boring (about 2 hours). Or, if you're feelin' like a little challenge, you can choose Crazy X challenge mode, which will keep you busy for about an hour or two as you unlock and defeat all of the challenges. Then you're pretty much done. $50.00 for less than half a day's worth of cheap arcade entertainment.

Not enough new features from the other two Crazy Taxi's. It's pretty much the same game, except there a couple new challenges, one new stage, and prettier graphics. This is more like half of an expansion pak.

It would have been a lot more useful to have a map. In Grand Theft Auto III (a game with much more depth), there were maps of each area, so it was easier to tell how to get to the desinations and keep track of where they were, and how to get to each one. But with this game, it's only after player for many many hours that you start to figure out where the short cuts are and how to use them.