Super Taxi Driver

We wish it were otherwise, but this isn't a sequel to Taxi Driver, the classic film directed by Martin Scorsese. There's no posing with guns, no hookers, no bloody denouement in a seedy hotel room. Then again, perhaps it's for the best. A mobile phone isn't the most appropriate place for a treatise on urban decay and alienation. All together now: "You talkin' to me?"

What this is, friends, is taxi simulator. Super Taxi Driver (or STD, for short) invites players to drive around town, pick up passengers and then take them to their destinations. And that's it. The review's over, move along, nothing to see here.

Still reading? Oh, all right then, there's a bit more to it than that. Each city stage takes place in a free-roaming environment, rendered in real-time with 3D graphics. Although there's a helpful arrow to point you in the right direction you can still drive anywhere you please, and the only condition is that you beat the clock and complete the stage within the allotted time limit.

Another interesting feature is the controls. The taxi isn't controlled in the traditional sense of keeping your finger pressed on the accelerate button. There's a gearing system instead, where you go up and down a gear to decide what speed you wish to travel at, and use the left or right keys to steer. It works well, and if timed properly you can even powerslide around corners.

It's a rare occurrence to have a 'sandbox' game on your phone (Saints Row being a rare exception) and years from now STD might be considered groundbreaking. But by other standards of interactive entertainment it does fall a bit short. There's a lack of variety, for one thing; there's not much else to do except collect passengers and drop them off. The scenery might change, and you can unlock different cars to drive, but these options have no impact on the one-dimensional gameplay.

Another problem is the collision detection, which is appalling. Careless drivers who collide with traffic – or even graze a bumper – will immediately come to a dead stop and lose precious time. Worse, when you pause to pick up a passenger, a car will deliberately crash into you from behind. It seems that even if you were careful to avoid oncoming traffic, the AI doesn't pay you the same courtesy, and in those terms the design of the game is flawed.

Perhaps most horrendous of all are the visuals. On the version we played they were blocky and pixellated, with features in the terrain a muddy blur, and it all looks and feels like an 8-bit horror from a bygone age. The fact that they're rendered on the fly, too, means that buildings literally materialise in front of you. The technical achievement of a free roaming environment comes at the expense of smooth graphics, and it'd have been far easier on the eye if STD had been given a top-down perspective like the original Grand Theft Auto, rather than the demanding 3D world of Crazy Taxi.

Owners of fancy Nokia N95s may have a different experience, of course, and this may well be a good choice for those looking to surf the high-end wave, but most of us are going to come away frustrated.

Any other complaints? Oh yeah, nearly forgot: there's no password or save system. This effectively means that however far you progress in the game, you're doomed to start from the very beginning every time you load it up.

All in all, STD is a game that needed a bit more love, care and attention before being released into the wild. It's got the bare bones of a great idea, but it's not enough to sustain a long-term interest. It's definitely not getting a tip from us.