City Driving Car Simulator
Xena Donovan
Taxi Life puts the player in the shoes of a business owner starting a taxi company in Barcelona. The objective is to grow the company by completing fares, purchasing new vehicles, upgrading said vehicles, hiring drivers and sending them out to complete even more fares to eventually become the taxi king or queen of the city.
The driving mechanics (speeding or not) offer a decent experience, with some quirks like over-steer and delayed reactions to sharp turns. There are varied camera options including cockpit, dash and hood. It would have been nice to have more options for a third-person camera because the one offered is a little too close to the car.
Also, the perk tree is worth taking the time to study before investing perk points. Level-up options include boosting the speed at which XP is gained, greater availability of VIP Jobs that pay more money, lower costs for maintenance services like towing, mechanics and cleaning, and so forth. My personal favorite perk provides the ability for drivers I hire to cost my company less in terms of salary while raising their efficiency. These all add a layer of strategy to what might otherwise be a straightforward taxi experience.
Another issue for me was that while Taxi Life strives for realism, it falls short in some aspects. Believable vehicle damage adds to the immersion, but a lack of consequences for traffic violations feels unrealistic. Hitting pedestrians netted me a 100 Euro fine, which is a pittance considering the thousands I easily stacked up in the first few taxi fares I completed. One would expect a heavier hand with such serious infractions. Running a red light right in front of the police was particularly jarring as it does not net a fine of any kind.
Taxi Life ultimately offers a mixed bag by blending realism with a fantasy upgrade system. While the attention to detail and perk system impress, issues like the lack of expected consequences detract from the experience.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Taxi Life offers no options for audio accessibility other than subtitles. The game is playable without sound, as there are no necessary audio cues needed for play. Taxi Life is fully accessible.
The driving itself feels good, with a couple of caveats. For some ungodly reason, the only way to keep your car from rolling forwards or backwards while stopped at a traffic light or stop sign is to alternate light taps of the left and right triggers. Because holding the left trigger will make you go in reverse, this was the only way to keep from rolling into another vehicle without engaging the parking brake at every stop. It drove me bonkers. The other caveat is more of an adjustment, I suppose, than an issue, but Americans should come in prepared to learn the traffic patterns and street signage necessary to drive competently in Barcelona.
Jason has been writing for Gaming Nexus since 2022. Some of his favorite genres of games are strategy, management, city-builders, sports, RPGs, shooters, and simulators. His favorite game of all-time is Red Dead Redemption 2, logging nearly 1,000 hours in Rockstar's Wild West epic. Jason's first video game system was the NES, but the original PlayStation is his first true video game love affair. Once upon a time, he was the co-host of a PlayStation news podcast, as well as a basketball podcast.
Our company designs software and hardware products for car driving education and entertainment: smart AI systems, virtual models of cities, car simulators, special vehicle simulators, industrial car driving simulators etc. We also design car driving computer games, on the basis of our own technologies and experience.
The car driving game named "City Car Driving" is a new car simulator, designed to help users experience car driving in а big city, the countryside and in different conditions or go just for a joy ride. Special stress in the "City Car Driving" simulator has been laid on a variety of different road situations and realistic car driving.
Around Barcelona, there are a number of monuments and points of interest that players can visit and document. Every now and again, fares will make conversation with you, and knowledge of these places can help direct the conversation in an interesting and enjoyable direction, increasing potential tips and making the drive more pleasant. It adds a unique incentive to driving around the city, getting to know the streets and improving your skills.
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We aim to make roads safer by researching the connection between humans and vehicles. We are home to the National Advanced Driving Simulator, and we now have a new name for our broader institute: the Driving Safety Research Institute.
The 24-foot NADS-1 simulator is on a six-legged base that rotates up to 330 and moves across the 64-foot square bay floor to simulate driving motions such as accelerating, lane changing, and skidding. There are 23 brakes on the large crossbeam that spans the room, while 42 hydrostatic bearings ride on a thin film of oil across smooth metal belts.
but i found nothing like a city driving simulator, you know, something like vdrift, but that the track is a city like gran theft auto 3 or similar... something with no amazing graphics, but something that works, i found this game but is only for windows and the requirements are pretty high compared to vdrift, etc... so im looking for something low enought to run on a netbook... i know that gaming is not for a netbook, but come on... a 10 to 5 years old game run smoothly on a computer like this... so... why theres no light and free alternative to a simulator like this one? why is there a limitation on hardware nowadays to make something that was completely possible years ago? i mean, if a gran theft auto 3 like game is possible on very low hardware... why an open source game like vdrift, etc require so much graphic power? i mean, an nvidia or ati card? yes i know, but i think that the way that is heading is not very unix like... i mean, okey, vdrift like open source games can have modules that if loaded, adds to the graphic detail or complexity of the simulation, but that will allow very low hardware to run the things it can withstand... well i think i really miss the point of my original post, lol :D
I have made a personal commitment not to reply in topics that start with a lowercase letter. Proper grammar and punctuation is a sign of respect, and if you do not show any, you will NOT receive any help (at least not from me).
VirtualBox as alternative to Wine, yes. But on a netbook it would probably be better to dual boot because of the low CPU power to run a virtual machine, experimental 3D drivers (on less tested hardware, on top of that)...
My 19 y.o. daughter has had her driver's license for 2 years, but still dreads driving in urban cities like San Francisco or New York. Her driving instructor says this dread is common, and recommended a driver simulator (like how the computer game Microsoft Flight Simulator can help with learning flying), but doesn't know any recent simulators. He brought up the Midtown Madness computer games, but they're outdated.
I am having my 16 child spend hours in this simulator before we hit the parking lot. I'm doing it for the same reason pilots, astronauts, and ship crew spend hours in simulators: it's a way to get familiar with the basics before you get in something intimidating, expensive, and dangerous.
But the nicest parenting win is that a simulator removes the parent-child dynamic from the messiest part of beginning driving. No one is there to see the early stalls, grinds, and driving into ditches. It's the PC that evaluates performance, and permits advancement.
If she wants to learn how to drive in a major city like SF or NY then she should get used to moving 15 miles per hour and master parallel parking. There's not a whole lot more to it than that unless she has a manual transmission car.
I learned to drive in SF, and I lived there 8 years as a driver. Typically I didn't drive because in major cities cars aren't as necessary but that's probably beside the point. Everything moves slower there as far as cars go. The lights are not timed so that 35 miles per hour will send you through green lights for miles at a time. No, they are timed to stop you every few blocks because otherwise traffic would explode.
Most of the streets will alternate between one way this way and one way that way. You get used to it, and it improves traffic flow. You'll still be moving slowly, but just with a few more signs to deal with.
Other drivers aren't as scary as some may suggest. There's a lot of tight merging because it's sort of like a slow motion game of opportunity there. If you need left, throw your blinker on and move when you have the chance. Other drivers expect this, so should she, and they slow down and you get in. That part can seem spooky at first, but eventually you see the efficiency of it and become that driver as well.
All of this is a generalization that suggests city driving is not that hard or scary and by no means can a driving simulator prepare you for it. Even if you had 600 hours of a VR driving instruction game, it's still just some fakeness and the brain will still go into panic when it comes time to put you to a real test. So just skip the preparations in some digital form. Practice driving locally. Deliberately get into traffic jams and drive around downtown where the streets may have one way designations that will better simulate a major city in all parts. Park a lot. Parallel only. Master that.
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