Taxi Chaos 2 | Switch Review

Let’s just get the elephant out of the room. Crazy Taxi. There, I said it. From the opening scream of The Offspring’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!” to the arcade timed chaos of tearing through a city with no concern for traffic laws or human life, Crazy Taxi was special. I never played it for progression. I played it for fun. For years, I have wondered if another game could capture that same reckless joy.

Taxi Chaos 2 certainly looks the part. It borrows heavily from that arcade chaos and layers a campaign structure on top. On paper, it feels like the spiritual successor I have been waiting for. In some ways, it actually is.

Retirement Can Wait

Vinny has retired. He arrives in San Valeda, a sun-soaked city, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, clearly ready to relax for the rest of his life. That plan immediately falls apart when a junk heap of a taxi begins asking him to jump behind the wheel and go pick up his old friend (the actual owner of this taxi). I immediately wondered why she didn’t do it herself, but whatever. Instead of enjoying retirement, he agrees to get back behind the wheel to help that old friend who now runs a taxi company.

That friend previously attempted to develop AI driven taxis. Naturally, this went poorly. The result is a fleet of aggressive, evil Taxibots that now dominate the streets. She wants to start over and do it right, using her original AI helper named Jean. Jean is installed in your taxi and projects a preferred path directly onto the road, guiding you through the city.

So yes, the premise is strange. A recently retired man arrives in paradise and immediately chooses to risk his life driving a taxi instead. But, hey! I can buy fun hats! That said, once I accepted the absurdity, I actually found myself enjoying the story. It leans into its AI-Can-Be-Dangerous-But-Also-Helpful themes just the right amount for me.

High Energy Driving With Rough Edges

Oh boy. This might be a little rough. Hang in there with me, the next section will be kinder.

At the start, Taxi Chaos 2 is a fun arcade style driving game. Controls feel twitchy, but manageable. You pick up passengers, deliver them across a city that appears to have been designed during a group drug experimentation phase, and race the clock. Roads zig and zag for no reason beyond gaming variety. Bridges lack guard rails. Stoplights exist purely for decoration. It feels chaotic in the right ways.

As the campaign progresses, however, the difficulty ramps up aggressively. Roadblocks begin appearing in places that make the time based objectives borderline impossible. Enemy Taxibots show up in force, behaving very much like the hyper aggressive cops from the original Driver on PlayStation. They relentlessly ram into you, often in groups.

Make a wrong turn and good luck recovering. Two or three Taxibots will pinball you around until progress feels nearly impossible, even with the game’s comically wild jump button. The Lakitu-style following camera does a decent job keeping up during these moments, but occasionally fail and I wound up staring at a cliff wall or something. Those rail-less bridges become especially dangerous. If a Taxibot hits you near one, your car is going swimming. When you respawn, your passenger calmly asks things like “Where did the road go?” or “Have you ever driven a taxi before?”

Some objectives simply do not make sense. One recurring task asks you to deliver three passengers who are into sports. There is no indicator showing which passengers qualify, so I picked up everyone I could. In all my time playing Taxi Chaos 2, I successfully delivered exactly zero sports fans while that objective was active.

Another favorite involved finding one specific person in this massive city and delivering them to a construction site. There is no marker. You must drive close enough to each potential passenger to read their name, but not so close that you accidentally pick them up. And you have 3 minutes to find him and deliver him. It is as frustrating as it sounds. I managed to finish this style of objective once.

On top of that, the controls themselves have issues. My car constantly drifted to the left. This was not controller drift. Other Switch 2 games worked perfectly. At other times, the car would sharply jolt to the right without any input from me. Occasionally, it would hop into the air as if hitting a massive obstacle that simply was not there.

Ultimately, it was this combination of escalating difficulty, poorly executed objectives, and unreliable controls that seriously hurt my experience.

Visual Energy Carries The Ride

Let’s get the minor complaints out of the way first. The screen feels cluttered in handheld mode, with too much information competing for space. Passenger dialogue is extremely repetitive, with every character saying the same six or seven lines over and over. I also missed the presence of licensed music.

That said, Taxi Chaos 2 shines visually. San Valeda is vibrant and colorful, with excellent contrast that makes objects easy to see and avoid. The enemy TaxiBots are the only thing that are white besides the clouds in the sky making them very easy to notice at a distance. You will still get rammed, but at least you can see it coming. Despite the clutter of the interface, the game does not miss a beat with the graphics. And the sunshine is just glorious especially within the context of our dreary stinky winter.

The terrain of the environment itself is wonderfully varied. Hills, bridges, sidewalks, grass, rocks, signs, and sharp turns keep the city interesting even when repeating routes. Over time, I began recognizing landmarks, memorizing shortcuts, and learning how to navigate around those pesky roadblocks that would block the preferred path. The preferred path is the only path that Jean directs you towards. It took several seconds before she would catch on that you’re off the directed path and re-plan the directions.

Final Thoughts – Taxi Chaos 2

When played in short, arcade timed bursts, Taxi Chaos 2 can be a genuinely fun distraction. Driving through a bright, well realized city delivers moments of excitement that absolutely capture flashes of the magic it is chasing.

Unfortunately, the long form campaign exposes too many problems. I appreciated the campaign option. The fun of the gameplay in those small chunks made the grind of a repetitive campaign tolerable and I would have truly loved it if not for the bugs and issues

There are individual parts here that deserve recognition, especially the graphics and the chaos of taxi driving. A couple of fixes and updates would result in a much higher score. As it stands, I can only score the game I played, and that experience simply was not very good.

To hear me talk more about Taxi Chaos 2, be sure to listen to the December 30th, 2025 episode of The Gaming Outisder Podcast around the 47:25 time stamp.

This review is based off of a Nintendo Switch copy of Taxi Chaos 2 provided by Overload PR for coverage purposes. It is also available on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.