There has been a steady increase of games released for the Atari VCS in 2023. As well as some retro Atari games, and retro games acquired by Atari, there have been a bunch of new indie games released on the platform. One that intrigued me more than many others that I’ve seen come up on the system is Doodle Taxi.
As a huge fan of Sega’s Crazy Taxi series, I’ve always been interested when there have been new games that may scratch a similar itch. Sega after all, haven’t released a true new Crazy Taxi game since Crazy Taxi 3 which game out on the original Xbox many years ago.
Doodle Taxi is similar to Crazy Taxi in that it is a taxi-based game where you’ll pick up customers and drive them to their destination to earn money. There are some things that make Doodle Taxi a unique experience. Some of these are inventive, if a little underdeveloped, and some of them are choices which I think hold the game back in certain ways.
From my understanding, this game which comes from Metgan Games, is made by a solo developer. This makes the game especially impressive for what it is, but whilst we can keep this fact in mind, I always lean towards judging a game by the merits of how fun and well-made it is, how much it costs, and how much of your time it is worth putting into it.
Separating Doodle Taxi from the likes of Crazy Taxi, the much more recent Taxi Chaos and even the Simpsons Road Rage is the art direction of the game. In Doodle Taxi, when you start playing the game pretty much the entire world you occupy, including the taxi you are driving looks like ink outlines on a brown paper bag. It’s unusual to see what is effectively a black and white game (or brown and black), but this is justified by the story of the game.
This is something that is especially underdeveloped in the game, but there is a story that is shown off with a story book presentation when you first play. Apparently, a wicked witch has put a curse on you and made you colour blind, or stolen all the colour from the world. Your aim is to restore colour to the world by taking customers to their destinations and driving safely…we’ll get to that aspect shortly.
It has to be said that the storyline is a really bizarre inclusion as you never see anything of this witch and the world you drive around in doesn’t look in any way fantasy based. It’s a shame, because a fantasy world would have made a fun setting which would have further set this apart from the likes of Crazy Taxi or even Grand Theft Auto which allows you drive around in a taxi. Some fantasy styles cars or horse and carts would have been cool.
But I will look past this wicked witch aspect as it is such a minor part of the game, I won’t hold it against the game. The fact is that the game has a very unique look with its brown paper bag filter, and it is very cool to see. One may think that this art style may start to tire quickly, but that is where Doodle Taxi has an ace up its sleeve. The more customers you get to their destinations the more the world starts to be coloured in. This isn’t quite like in the movie Pleasantville where just certain objects fill in fully in an otherwise black and white world, but instead everything starts to gain colour like you turned the colour filter up on a TV.
When you first start the game, you have one taxi you can choose to drive, and there are several more which cost money that you earn through playing the game to unlock.
Starting the game, I was impressed by the graphics, which whilst simple in certain ways, were more than functional, and with the impressive and unique art style were fun to drive around. The music is a sign that this is anything but a Crazy Taxi clone. With gentle and relaxing music, you may think this is odd in a game where you’re racing around in a taxi, but if anything, it can be seen as an indicator that in this game you will do well if you take things at a more relaxed and safer pace.
On my first playthrough with the initial taxi I was surprised that the game gives you a percentage that you are trying to fill up. I thought this was to do with how many customers you needed to take to their destinations to complete the playthrough, but actually this percentage was an indicator of how much you have restored the colour to the world. What I wouldn’t figure out until my second playthrough was that the game rewards you for trying safely. This is in stark contrast to something like Crazy Taxi, where although it doesn’t benefit you crash into things as it slows you down, you’re not directly penalised for smashing into everything on the road.
In Doodle Taxi the game kinda gives you a mixed message of what it wants from you, as there is a metre at the top of the screen. If you crash into things, it will turn red and when you drop off a customer you will revert the world back to being more black and white. But if you want to turn the world more colourful you need to turn the metre green and you seem to do this primarily by driving really really fast. Maybe it turns green by going further distances without crashing, but in my experience the best way was to drive as fast as possible and see it fill up green.
So, the game seemingly wants you to drive really fast, but also not crash. That is fine, but as you’ll find especially with the fast taxis, your best bet for success isn’t speed but getting the metre full from speeding, and then continuing to take the customer to their destination whilst going very carefully and this usually means slowly.
I was surprised to get to 100% on my first playthrough with the initial taxi, and this took me a few minutes, but probably because I didn’t fully understand that filling the green metre was the key to success rather than the number of customers. Having earned enough to unlock the fastest taxi on the game I found that this made for a very different experience.
The faster car is frankly too fast to have any real success on the game, and this is where I discovered that slow and steady wins the race. I never found that I was in much danger of running out of time, and unlike Crazy Taxi where you have an overall time limit where dropping customers off quicker gives you time bonuses, Doodle Taxi seems to give you random amounts of time to either find a customer or get them to their destination. It did always seem like it gave ample time and the only times I ever got a game over was when I twice crashed into the same broken area of road where the car literally get stuck and was unable to move, or when I gave up and let the time run out on purpose.
Picking up customers and dropping them off is pretty much the same as in Crazy Taxi, but in what is the biggest difference to how Crazy Taxi plays, there isn’t an ever-present on-screen arrow to lead you to the destination in the open city. Instead, there is an on-screen map and there is a yellow indicator of your destination. If your destination isn’t close enough to be shown on screen, the yellow dot will hover at the edge of the map which will indicate where you need to head towards. This works almost as well and I was surprised at this as I always thought the arrow in Crazy Taxi was genius to the point that I’d like to see actual car windscreens have an AR heads up display with this instead of a satnav.
One gripe I have with the game is that when you pick up or drop off a customer you get a screen pop up over the action which blocks the view of what you’re doing. You can keep driving when you pick someone up and if you can spot the yellow dot come up on the map as this happens you can save a second or two to turn whilst you’re waiting for the pop-up screen to vanish. Annoyingly you have to press a button to get rid of the pop up when you have dropped a customer off. I think the info of your money and colour percentage should be completely on the heads up display and not have these pop ups at all as they slow down the action.
The controls of the game seem pretty solid and I liked controlling most of the cars, even if the fastest one was a bit too fast. A game like this wouldn’t work if it had bad controls, but fortunately the controls are easy to get into and driving around is fun.
Another down side is that the other cars on the road are kinda annoying. They’re slow and there’s not many of them. The town you drive around in isn’t huge and there is only one level in the game. It would have been nice if the streets were busier to add more challenge for you to weave in and out of. Also the other cars are going where they’re going and there’s nothing you can do about it. So if you crash into one you don’t bump them out the way and they stay on course as if you weren’t there.
I’d like to see this game developed further and it would be great to have another level. Something more to tie what you experience in the game with the storyline they’ve created would also be good, and maybe some ways to earn bonus cash like how you can in Crazy Taxi, by pulling off certain moves with your car.
Conclusion
This is a simple game, but a fun one. It’s far from perfect, but with a cheap price I can certainly say it is a game I’ll probably play often on my Atari VCS. At the moment I believe it is an Atari VCS exclusive and on that console, it does stand alone as there is nothing else like it available.
You can get loads more Gaming articles in the Gaming section of the site, and don’t forget to check out all our gaming videos on the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube Channel and the Geek Battle comedy panel show on the Extreme Improv XStreamed YouTube Channel
