London Taxi Rush Hour review

We really wanted to like this game. We liked Crazy Taxi and we were hoping for great things from this obvious knock-off. But it's crap. It’s like Crazy Taxi’s-not-quite-ready-to-hang-with-the-grown-ups little brother, complete with bad hair and pimples. We apologize to little brothers with bad hair and pimples, but while mousse and Clearasil will solve their problems, this game will always be bad.

It starts with the “why the *&#@(*@&*@&# did we just go off the road AGAIN?” hell that is driving with the Wii Remote. The control scheme is full of "could be cool if the game worked… but it doesn't" details like pushing the remote forward for an extra boost of speed. But the game’s graphics lag so badly that the acceleration often ends with taxi + brick wall = start over. At least, we think it was a brick wall. It could have been a hedge. With the graphics, it was hard to tell.

Speaking of the graphics, they're not just bad. They're awful. They're a horrid, terrible, do-not-show-to-young-children, therapy inducing, "oh-my-God-did-all-games-used-to-look-like-this?" freak show. We only wish we could see and/or recognize Big Ben. Instead the graphics look more like Mom and Dad’s slides of Our Trip to London…stop motion and everything…and what little you can see mostly consists of grey smudges with occasional Ichabod Crane-type human wondering around. Tetris has more interesting architecture.

The only crazy things about London Taxi Rush Hour, as far as we could tell, were that we drove on the left side of the road (and even that won't be unusual to our UK readers), and that any self-respecting game developer actually let a game this bad out onto the shelves. Even for $20, this wreck is a pass. Rent it if you must, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Mar 4, 2008