Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator Review | Navigating Barcelona’s Streets (PC)

Simulator games are a genre within the video game landscape that mostly have the players playing as a specific person with a specific job, for example, a chef who manages a kitchen, or a mechanic who repairs cars, for today’s article, we take on the mantle as a taxi driver within the city of Barcelona. Welcome to Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator.

With that in mind, for this article, we will review Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator‘s many aspects, including the most apparent part of the gameplay, which is its driving system, as well as taking a look at Barcelona’s streets and how we can navigate the city’s different roads and how we can manage our cars with the Garage system. Let’s begin.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator recently came out on March 8, 2024, and is available on Steam for $24.99, PlayStation 5 for $39.99, and Xbox Series X|S for $39.99.

Story | A New Face in Barcelona

The story within Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is honestly barebones and doesn’t take off once you finish the game’s Tutorial mission. What we know, however, is the fact that we play as a new taxi driver who is trying to seek a fortune within Barcelona, finding passengers every day, and building up our taxi empire.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator lets us pick our personal and company name for a Career save, meaning that we have greater control over what we can present to the in-game passengers. Moreover, we can select our company logos and manage our cars in the Garage system, which we will discuss further in this review’s gameplay section.

Overall, this game’s story is unfortunately not one of its strong points, but the backstory and early cutscene are enough to help our footing before we tackle Barcelona’s streets.

Sunset’s Drive.

Gameplay | Driving to Your Fortune

The bread and butter of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator are its driving system and the management aspects, in which we have to juggle between finding passengers daily to maintain your car while also building up your taxi empire from the scratch. For this next part of the review, we will talk about two gameplay aspects that I find shape the overall ‘simulation’ feel of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator: the driving mechanics and the taxi managements.

Driving Mechanics

Of course, just like the game title suggests, most of the game time you’ll spend on Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator will happen behind the wheels, where you control your taxi around the streets of Barcelona, trying to get passengers safely reach their destination. Fortunately, the game’s driving controls and system work incredibly well, both with controller and steering wheel.

The tutorial in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is very helpful; you gain a lot of information and can try it right away, and if you’re uncomfortable with a transmission system, you can switch it out later on with another transmission system. I find myself quite clueless, honestly, when I first try this game out. There are a lot of car systems that I don’t know which buttons to press, or which road side should I drive, as Spain’s driving system differs to my home country’s roads, as I’m used to left-hand driving system, so having to adjust to right-hand driving system in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is both challenging and fun for me.

The cars in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator all feel very fluid and quite realistic. For example, you can’t drive forward immediately after you reverse your car, and you also need a few seconds braking your car before it stops completely, something that I find faithful to real-life counterpart.

However, one thing that is incredibly annoying in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is the awful AI drivers. They are… barbaric, sometimes. Even if you comply with every road rules (stopping at red sign, giving a sign when you’re about to turn left/right, etc.), other drivers will ram your car from behind or just speeding up against the road signs, which ended up breaking my sense of realism a bit. Though the developers have acknowledged this issue, the fact that it slips past through the quality assurance process is quite jarring.

Obeying the Rules.

Taxi Managements

Up next in this Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator review is the taxi managements system, where we as the players can build our taxi empire from the scratch. It’s never easy to build your legacy, and in this game, you will need to accumulate both money and EXP, which you can gain by simply accepting passengers daily.

Taxis are useless without their passengers, and so you must find them if you’re hoping to earn steady money in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator. These passengers can be a tourist, a Catalonian, or an angry business person who keeps telling you to go faster. Each passenger have their own personality, and sometimes, they can request things from you, ranging from a simple command such as opening the car’s window to a complex conversation about Barcelona and its architecture.

Once you manage to gain few passengers, the Garage system will unlock. The Garage is your one-stop friend of getting your car, drivers, and Skill Tree ready. This is where you manage your taxi empire in Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, from repairing your current car, buying the next car that is either faster or sturdier than your current one, to recruit more drivers to manage different districts of Barcelona, you can do it all here. However, it is a shame that the Skill Tree is less impactful than I’d like, as a lot of the Skills you can gain is just bonus money or EXP you can gain during the day.

Garage Management.

Graphics and Sound Design | Mini Barcelona

Moving on, we will discuss Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator‘s graphics and sound design for this final part of the review. The developers, Simteract, claim that this game reproduce a large part of Barcelona (around 460 km wide), and although I can’t fully confirm this fact during my playthrough, I did see some resemblances to the real city of Barcelona after taking a look at Google Maps and compare them with the in-game locations.

In addition to the beautiful graphics, this game’s sound design is great as well. I don’t find any faults in the music nor the car engines’ sound. While there are almost no pedestrian chatters or environmental hues (chirping birds, or the wind hitting the leaves, etc.), you can still find other sound in the game satisfactory and enough to accompany your journey to claim the spot as Barcelona’s greatest taxi service.

Overall, Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator looks phenomenal. From the world itself, to the cars we use, the details are simply superb. However, the character models are subpar and not remarkable in any way, though that’s not an issue in a simulation game like this one. The sound design is satisfying, as each pedal you use generates a crisp sound that most car enthusiasts will appreciate. 

This Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator review on PC is possible thanks to Nacon for providing a review code to us.