London Cab Challenge

London Cab Challenge

Taxi Racer: PlayStation 2 Edition

Genre(s):	Racing
Platform(s):	PlayStation 2
Release:	FR/DE: April 2006 EU: July 28, 2006
Developer(s):	Mere Mortals
Publisher(s):	Phoenix Games

London Cab Challenge is a 2006 racing video game developed by Mere Mortals and published by Phoenix Games for the PlayStation 2 only in Europe.

Gameplay

Each mission involves picking up and delivering customers to their destinations as quickly as possible while staying in the proper lane and avoiding collisions with traffic.^[1]

Why It Failed The Cab Challenge

First of all, this game is nothing more than a rip-off of Driver as the gameplay is quite similar to said game. The vehicle itself and the locations also look similar.
The gameplay is painfully repetitive and gruesomely boring at the same time because it's just about taking passengers anywhere, like Crazy Taxi or Driver, which this game rips off, and what's most interesting, it has a much more varied gameplay than rip-off itself.
The city in the game does not look like London at all and is poorly designed and is a very small area despite the fact that the PlayStation 2 was a really powerful console and could easily generate a big and real London and with nicer graphics than this game. Games that came out earlier like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 or the London Racer series were able to resemble London action games unlike this game.
The music is generally very bland and practically not memorable despite the fact that the one from the game is looped, the music from the menu is also not the most interesting and not too catchy as if the developers had no idea to compose a fairly interesting song that would matched the game.
The game also seems to be unfinished to the point that you might think that it has not been tested at all because it has a whole lot of bugs and imperfections, for example, a vehicle can sometimes get stuck in a building, a lamppost or a tree and sit there until restarting the game and sometimes the textures are excessively stretched and may even go beyond the model of the object to which they adhere.
The controls for a car game are extremely terrible because the driving model is completely broken due to the turning because it turns so slowly that you can very easily run into anything, be it a tree. lamppost or other vehicle.
Awful physics and the cab handles poorly. When a car collides into an object, it bounces and easily flips over. Cars can even bounce into the air and do a 360-degree roll after colliding with another car. Literally as if the developers didn't even want to test this game and made it in a hurry.
Ugly visuals and very blurry textures that makes the game look like a early PS1, 3DO or SEGA Saturn game. Even the PS2 version of Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions, which is heavily inferior the Xbox version in terms of graphics, looks better than this, and that also came out four years before!
Terrible draw distance, with cars, suddenly showing up far too close to you for you to react to it due to the poor controls and handling of the cab so you'll probably collide with another car or object very often and you won't have time to react early and even create a false free space so you'll think that nothing stands in the way of getting straight to your destination because you won't be able to see anything before you will collide. This is especially unforgivable for a PlayStation 2 game with terrible graphics by that console's standards because it would be extremely easy to make a galactic long view range, and even many PS1 games with nicer graphics have a larger field of view.
The sound effects from the vehicles are downright awful because they are not at all like what they should be, engine noises are more like the sounds of a hair dryer, for example.
Unlike most taxi games, there are no people seen in the city, considering this game requires the driver to carry their clients. In the games from the Crazy Taxi series that came out earlier than this game, you could see various people walking on the street and even in Driver released 7 years earlier you could see various people walking on the street, which rather gives the impression that the developers were really lazy and didn't want to add these people to the game.
Collision detection is terrible because the vehicle can immediately bounce too far and even push it to the other end of the road, as a result of which it can bounce back from the next object and create one big chaos and a vicious circle.
The play area itself is incredibly tight:
- There are invisible walls that block you from taking paths that would otherwise be unobstructed and clear for you to take.
- There is also an overabundance of cars in the game and they effectively clog up almost the entire track, creating a traffic jam and you will have serious problems with reaching your destination and you will often collide with another car.

Reception

Jeuxvideo.com gave a 1/20 to this game and said that this game should never see the light of day and that it's hard to put into words how awful this game is. This is the only known review from a critic.

In addition, the game received an extremely negative reception from players and is considered one of the worst car games on the PlayStation 2.