Taxi Jam, Nerv Media’s entry into the time management/route management field, has just been released in the app store. While Taxi Jam bears many similarities to other recent app store releases of the same ilk, there are enough twists and features, not to mention a ramped-up difficulty, that should help carve out a cozy place in the market.

The goal in Taxi Jam is to use your fleet of taxis to pick up passengers and drop them off at their desired locations. Unlike taxi-based competitors like TaxiDrive or Taxiball, you can, and must, control several taxis at once to keep up with the transportation needs of the waiting passengers who will randomly appear around the board as white figures. The longer the figures wait for a ride, the more their bodies fill with red rage goo. If they fill completely, they pop and cost you a life. Unlike other time management games like TaxiDrive, Flight Control, or Harbor Master, you get 5 lives in Taxi Jam, rather than just one. Crashing a taxi with a passenger inside will also cost you a life, as will collecting a passenger and taking too long to deliver that passenger to his destination. Crashing an empty cab, however, will not cost you anything other than the time it takes to drag another taxi from the station into service on the roads.

Any taxi can pick up any passenger and, once he is in the taxi, the vehicle will receive a colored ring overlay that corresponds to the color-coded location where the passenger must be dropped off. These locations appear as colored rectangles in different parts of the city. At the start, there is only one drop location. As you progress in the game, more and more will appear, requiring lots of planning to get passengers to their locations quickly without impeding the paths of other taxis. You receive points when you successfully drop off your passenger at his desired location. There is only one passenger allowed per vehicle. Drag taxis to and from the station as necessary. Too many taxis are about as helpful as too few.

You must also be aware of the emergency vehicles that will speed through your streets at any given time. Their routes will be denoted by flashing red broken lines, setting them apart from the solid lines created when you map out routes for your taxis. Vehicles like fire engines and buses can only travel in straight lines across the city, so be sure to clear out that road when you hear the sirens wailing. Police cars will wend their way through the city, requiring you to clear a longer and more widespread path for them. You can alter the paths of your taxis by redrawing the path lines. Simply use your finger to draw a path from the desired vehicle to its desired location. We did run into issues with passengers waiting at corners. We would draw the line to the end of one block, but the passenger wouldn’t get it. We would have to draw another path to turn the corner before he would enter the vehicle. Similarly, some paths were drawn around the corner that wouldn’t cause the passenger to get in, so we had to backtrack once more. Not a big deal, but it is unclear where the path must be drawn to in order to get the passenger in the vehicle without further intervention, which becomes a problem as the board fills up with taxis and passengers and red rage goo.

The graphics are very nice, with a clean interface and stylish look. We did have a hard time picking out waiting passengers or unmoving taxis from time to time, as the screen gets quite busy and it’s easy to overlook non-moving objects. Also, the purple and blue colors aren’t quite distinctive enough to quickly determine which is which, costing us precious time to make a decision or reroute a vehicle sent to the wrong location. The sounds in the game are good, with honking car horns, garbled radio voices, wailing sirens, and effects for dropping off and picking up passengers. There is funky beat that plays during the game, as well. There are three city layouts to play, with New York unlocked from the start and London and Paris unlockable when you’ve deliver 100 passengers in the previous city. There are local and global leaderboards, though the game exits and opens a Safari window to display them. It would be nice if this was handled in-game.
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Though similar in style to other games, Taxi Jam certainly sets itself apart from the pack. Replayability is good, as leaderboards provide motivation and the difficulty level, though frustrating, is quite challenging. Nerv Media has competitively priced Taxi Jam at $0.99, in keeping with the other games in this genre and making the purchase a no-brainer for fans of these games. Taxi Jam delivers a solid 4-Dimple score.

Taxi Jame gets our AppSmile 4-Dimple rating:

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