I had very high hopes for Crazy Taxi 3. I had never played the game previously, but really found myself drawn to the "Taxi Driver” mini-game in Grand Theft Auto 3. The idea of racing around the city dodging traffic and trying to beat to clock was very appealing and played extremely well in GTA3. So it was with this preconceived, perhaps naive notion that I grabbed a copy of Crazy Taxi 3. Make no mistake of it, I *wanted* to like Crazy Taxi 3 very much, and tried hard to do so but the game is in virtually every way a massive letdown of what could have been a great title.

The first thing that needs to be mentioned is the hideous audio bug in the game. As far as I can tell this occurs for everyone and is an actual software error. Basically, if you pick up a group of people, for no readily apparent reason the game randomly emits a sound akin to a landslide or a wet-fart. This doesn't go away and will continue until you quit, and is perhaps the single most annoying thing I have ever experienced on X-Box. Period. On PC such a bug is excusable as it is fixable, but on X-Box something so obvious should have never, ever, made it passed a halfway competent QA department. If you are any good at playing the game, the sound basically has to be turned off because the bug will drive you insane. Either that or you just don't get to pick up groups of customers, which precludes you from doing well in the first place. It is a lose-lose situation that in my opinion totally ruins the game.

This is in addition to some already excruciatingly bad audio. The voice actors are "good” as in they are probably quite talented folk, but the bad clichés and hokey dialogue is at times painful, and some characters just make you want to spend your time devising horrible ways to kill them. The emphasis is clearly on comic humour and granted a few of them do garner a chuckle early-on, but after you've played for an hour or so you'll have forgotten how to laugh. Compounding this is the seemingly random audio clips. You will often be told you are going too slow by customers even if you are about to get a speed bonus for dropping them off. This will often be repeated ten or fifteen times in a group of four pickup with your character responding most of the time, and it truly is enough to make you despise the creators of the sound.

The main voiceover throughout the game is quite probably the worst, as they are trying to make him sound "crazy” but instead he just sounds like an old smoking guy with bad constipation. As a slight consolation to this, the game does have some fantastic music. Lots of bouncy, upbeat rock-pop style stuff from the Offspring amongst others that suits the frenetic pace of the game well.

The game itself feels very arcade-like to play. It is definitely not a serious driving game, and the characters and physics reflect this. The standard play-mode sees you picking a driver in one of three locations: Glitter Oasis, Small Apple or West Coast. You can pick between normal mode, and some time limited modes. From there you proceed to drive around your chosen city racing against the clock, trying to make as much money as you can. Once time runs out, you are given a license rating and the option to save that record.

...and? I can sense your anticipation. Sadly, that's it. No really, that's it. You play, earn a ranking, and then go back to the menu. There's nothing further to do or unlock, nothing clever to find in the cities. That's it. Now I know why it is called a "mini-game” in Grand Theft Auto 3, which, incidentally, had more depth to it than the main game of Crazy Taxi 3. You can pull off a variety of tricks in game to earn you more money, but you can do that in GTA3 as well if you want.

Before you storm off in a huff and give up on this review, there is a tiny, tiny flicker of light in the darkness. Crazy X mode allows you to play a variety of "crazy” minigames. These are for the most part pretty basic, such as jumping a certain distance or knocking a ball, but some are quite challenging such as hopping from platform to platform in under a certain time. Many of them will just frustrate you as the manual includes no explanation as to how to play them, just a description of how to do it. However, they do add a smidgen of depth to a title that Rockstar managed to make into a minigame in GTA3. The difficulty of the game varies, as it can be quite difficult to get a high-ranking license, and some of the mini-games are diabolical. But that is all dependent on you *wanting* to play the game, which I myself did not.

The graphics for Crazy Taxi 3 are passable. There is little evidence that it makes any use of the X-Box's capabilities, but the framerate is generally smooth with the exception of a few hiccups. The textures are fairly basic and the ground especially shows little detail and appears very blurred around your cab. The vehicles themselves are colourful and visually distinct, but everything in the game seems to suffer from a low poly-count which means that while the graphics aren't awful, there's nothing at all special about them either.

One of the few things that could have made Crazy Taxi 3 a decent title would have been multiplayer support, yet the game has none whatsoever. Being able to compete against a mate in the normal mode or Crazy X minigames and have a laugh at how dodgy the game is would have been terrific. The omission of any kind of multiplayer is really the nail in the coffin for this title.