If you’ve ever ridden in a taxi in San Francisco you know just how horrifying it can be. Not only do you have the traffic, pedestrians, and sketchy roads of any other major metropolis, you’ve got the hills. Follow a driver around for a day and you’ll see that aggression, anger, and nerves of steel are qualities that are far more important than friendliness or accounting. While that sort of life may not seem appealing, it can be quite a bit of fun. You really haven’t lived until you’ve driven on the sidewalk to get where you’re going.
That brings us to the game at hand. TaxiTaxi from Binary Pumpkin attempts to recreate the drama, craziness, and planning that goes into being a big city driver; minus the life ending stress of course. The game is inspired by the popular mobile game Flight Control, where you have to manage an airport by diverting planes to-and-fro in order to… keep doing that. Honestly Flight Control can be a little shallow, something that TaxiTaxi looks to fix that. You view the game from a beautiful overhead map that can be shifted for an even more scenic isometric view. From there you’ll draw out routes for your taxis to follow in order to maximize efficiency and profit.
The team seems to have put in a decent amount of work on the title already, with a funding video that shows nothing but the game, always nice! They even have the San Francisco level up and running, with more maps coming in the future. All maps are powered by eeGeo’s mapping platform technology, so locals shouldn’t scoff at any problems with accuracy. Many of the gameplay details haven’t been revealed, such as how closely you manage your fleet, the variety of shortcuts available, and whether or not you can get into fist fights with Lyft drivers (don’t count on it), but a lot of that information will undoubtedly become available as the funding campaign carries on.
The team, which is comprised of some long time industry veterans, is currently running their campaign through Kickstarter in hopes of raising £35,300. With those funds they say they’ll be able to operate for the three months they need to complete the initial version of the game and start working on expanding it. The TaxiTaxi campaign runs until October 24th.
