Crazy Taxi 2 is Sega's followup game to Crazy Taxi. The basic premise is that you are a cabbie, you drive around the city trying to deliver your customers as fast as you can. It improves on the original in a number of ways. But can't quite match the feel that the original had.
They recycled the game engine from Crazy Taxi. They also recycled a lot of the same songs by The Offspring. The car controls were tweaked somewhat from the original, giving a much different feel to the driving. Several control bugs were fixed, and a new move called the Crazy Hop was added. One noticable difference is that you can't do those insane Crazy Drift combos that were quite easy in the original. The ability to pick up several customers at once was added, although only in predefined groups. I was quite pleased to see that Crazy Taxi 2 did not have the subtle racism that was all over the original Crazy Taxi.
This sequel is set in New York City. It is much larger than the original game. But there is a sameness to everything that makes it much harder to know exactly where you are on the map. The Mini games are much more difficult than they were in the original game. The whole game for that matter is a lot harder.
You get to select from 4 drivers at the beginning of the game.
The drivers each drive a different
car that have mildly different
speed and
handling. After you beat enough of the mini games you will gain access to 2 more vehicles that any of the drivers can use. The
bicycle, and the
baby carriage. The
bicycle is the fastest
vehicle in the game, but it handles completely different than the cars do. There is no reason to use the
baby carriage as it is worse than the cars or the
bike. When you beat the final mini games you will gain access to the cars and drivers from the original
Crazy Taxi as well as
Another Day mode. In Another Day mode some
customers will
respawn allowing to play forever if you are good enough.
The original Crazy Taxi was an arcade game as well as a console game. This one was never released on arcade hardware, and I think I know why. Had this been a computer game, it would have been considered a mission pack and not a stand alone game. This is pretty much the same game with different maps. I really liked this game, but I suggest the original, as it had a much better feel.
Be sure and read the Crazy Taxi node because almost everything said about the original game also applies to the sequel.