Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator — Everything We Know

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of riding shotgun in a sleek taxi cab on a cold winter’s evening, then you’ll no doubt enjoy the likes of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator. Its concept is simple: there’s a taxi, a fledgling driver, and the whole of Barcelona in the palm of their hand. Think Crazy Taxi, but without the craziness of a liberty spike-sporting, Hawaiian shirt-popping cabbie barging into every street sign and pedestrian, and you’ll have a rough idea of what it’s getting at. That’s SIMTERACT’s upcoming game, in a nutshell, and it’s planning to release as early as next month on a whole bunch of platforms.

If Taxi Life has caught your interest, and you’re looking to fill that simulation void, then be sure to read on for a few more details. Here’s everything we can currently tell you about Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator ahead of its 2024 debut.

What Is Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator?

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is a first-person driving simulation experience, and more importantly, a life-like recreation of an actual “day in the life” of a Barcelona cabbie. In the game, players will have the opportunity to build their own business, as well as fasten all the bells and whistles to their own ride to help score higher paying fares and, in turn, earn more cash for valuable upgrades.

Sure enough, this isn’t your typical driving simulation game, in the case that its gameplay isn’t likely to revolve around shuttling clients around in ten seconds flat whilst simultaneously jamming out to The Offspring’s “All I Want” for the umpteenth time. In fact, Taxi Life will, more or less, feature something a little more sophisticated and suave than the average high-octane arcade sim. In other words, you will need to obey the rules of the road. And yes, you will need to stop at red lights.

Story

From the sounds of the blurb, the game will follow an up-and-coming cab driver in the bustling city of Barcelona. In a rags-to-riches fashion, players will need to work their way up the career ladder and search for new methods to improve the day-to-day operations in and around the city. As for how you go about doing this, of course, will be entirely up to you, as the game will be nonlinear and open to explore in any way you see fit.

“You arrive in Barcelona with only a car and a dream to your name,” the description reads in part. “As you go out and learn the streets, you quickly realize that each delivery task can bring on a variety of challenges. Managing impatient passengers, rush couriering, traffic jams, road accidents, stormy days, and city events are all part of the experience in Taxi Life.”

Gameplay

According to the devs, players will be able to “complete time-based jobs, evade traffic jams, and road hazards, all while respecting the rules of the road.” What’s more, as it’s an open-world simulation game, it will also allow players to “discover famous city landmarks while building your transportation empire!” In other words, you won’t be restricted to a couple of tasks; there’ll also be upgrades to purchase, parts to unlock, and odd jobs to complete in and around the bustling districts of Barcelona.

To make it perfectly clear, Taxi Life won’t be your bog-standard reckless driving experience, as it’ll task players with respecting the rules of the road, and paying close attention to their surroundings. So, hardly a spiritual successor to Crazy Taxi, after all.

From the looks of the footage that has been shown to date, a lot of the gameplay will involve dealing with unique requests for each client. In a typical case, this means having to roll down the windows, pick up the pace, or make several pit stops en route to a final destination. Between jobs, you will also need to build your empire, which means adding on new parts to your taxi, and establishing your presence in the city of Barcelona. So again, a lot more than your run-of-the-mill cabbie sim.

Development

Taxi Life will be available on March 7, 2024 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC!

Pre-order now!

🚖Playstation: https://t.co/Y13JnLpI2V
🚖 Xbox: https://t.co/XPmkn1gJL0…
🚖Wishlist on Steam: https://t.co/Wh499JgcUC pic.twitter.com/PIhcYIdyeB

— Simteract (@simteract) January 11, 2024

The folks behind Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator are none other than SIMTERACT, the same studio that brought Train Life: A Railway Simulator to consoles and PC back in 2022.

“We have created professional simulators, such as a train driver simulator for US trainees,” the team writes in its newsletter. “We have used that as the basis for our current business, gaining knowledge about simulations and obtaining the technological proficiency needed to work with real data.”

“Since 2018 our main focus is creating games,” the post continues. “We employ specialists with gaming experience, and our team is now over 60 people strong. In everyday work we are using modern equipment, and utilizing our original technologies to find breakthroughs in efficiency. Our genre focus is premium simulation games, and as of 2021 our company has joined the stock market.”

Trailer

Have the city lights of Barcelona piqued your interest? If so, then you’ll be pleased to know that there is, actually, a trailer of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator already out. You can check it out for yourself in the video embedded above.

Release Date, Platforms & Editions

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator will be launching on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC on March 7, 2024. As for whether or not it’ll be releasing on Nintendo Switch is still anybody’s guess. For now, though, it appears that the game will be locked to the aforementioned platforms.

Interested in staying up to date with Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator? If so, then be sure to check in with the folks over at SIMTERACT for all the latest updates via their official social handle here. If anything does change ahead of its planned 2024 launch, then we’ll be sure to fill you in on all the key details right here on gaming.net.

So, what’s your take? Will you be picking up a copy of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator when it arrives on its chosen platforms? Let us know your thoughts over on our socials here.