Vidjama Gmaes Work

The latest piece of crap from Simteract.

Developer Simteract has made two games so far. The first is a title called Train Life: A Railway Simulator that gamers hate because Simteract released it in a buggy state and then abandoned it in order to work on and release a second buggy piece of trash. And by abandoned, I mean the game released in August 2022 and the last patch was released in December 2022.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator…wait, I’m seeing a pattern here. The game came out March 7 and I rented it on PS5. I’d like to make that a point of this review. Taxi Life is a simulator game where you begin a business driving a taxi and the gameplay is driving a taxi, and driving a taxi, and driving a taxi, and driving a taxi. You pick people up, you drop them off, you refuel your car, you get the shits from bad Taco Bell, you destroy a gas station toilet, rinse and repeat. I came into the game knowing exactly what I was getting into from a conceptual level.

It’s part of a genre I call “games to slowly die to.” You don’t get anything out of it outside of maybe something to do while listening to podcasts. And like most games that call themselves “simulators,” there’s minimal connection with reality in this game. You’re not really going to learn anything about driving a taxi in the city.

I suppose the biggest problem with Taxi Life is that the game is badly optimized. Pathetically even. Embarrassingly bad. The devs had the horsepower of a PS5 and managed to make a game they developed that’s likely 90% store-bought assets (most of these simulator games are virtually asset flips) chug. Taxi Life has massive frame drops at every opportunity and freezes up constantly considering it looks like a PS3-era title. There’s no reason for the game to run this badly when cars more than 50 feet in front of you are already animating at 5 frames per second and I can watch decoration pop in from about 100 feet away.

Then there’s the AI. Traffic Life’s AI is so bad it genuinely paints a bad light on the company and I’ll explain why in a minute. I get my ass blasted while fully stopped at a red light roughly once every ten minutes. Cars get stuck in the road and cause massive traffic pileups because the driver doesn’t comprehend that there’s a green light. A lot of traffic signs stay green for a whole ten seconds, I counted. Occasionally cars will just freak out and blow down the road. If a car (including yours) comes into contact with any scenery, the physics system completely breaks.

AI pedestrians will routinely walk back and forth across the road, coupling up and forming an impenetrable barrier. The game fines you one hundred euros for hitting a pedestrian and you don’t even get to see your victim ragdoll like a chump. The scary thing about this game is that Simteract sells AI Traffic software that it claims runs off “intelligent algorithms.” If Taxi Life is using that software, that software is probably a scam.

If Taxi Life didn’t run like absolute crap and have awful controls it would actually be a perfectly servicable game. I’m willing to go the extra mile and say that the game should theoretically have crappy drivers for realism sake, even though the drivers here are clearly broken and not just bad for the sake of being a simulator.

I played Spider-Man on my PS5 and it runs like hot buttery goodness. This game runs like sandpaper on an open wound.

Rating: 1/5