The Last Taxi casts you as the last human taxi driver on the last city on Earth. What could possibly go wrong?
Fortunately, veering off course and smashing into a rock wall (the city in question is underground) isn’t one of the hazards. This PC VR game isn’t about driving – that’s automatic. While it does charge you with a few taxi-preserving tasks, such as throwing up an energy shield or honking your horn when someone’s in the path of your flying cab, it’s the interactions you’ll be having while playing The Last Taxi that are the real draw.
The joy of The Last Taxi comes from the conversations, moral dilemmas and, when you’ve got the time, just watching the city out of the window then slamming your horn just in time to avoid a costly collision. We first got wind of the game back in April and, delving briefly into the release version, it’s left a big impression on us.
You see your passenger chatting away in your virtual screen, and conversation options pop up. The happier they are, the more money you can potentially make, which is a challenge in itself. But, just in case you think the screen is a big cop-out to avoid rendering the passenger themselves, you can also turn around and see them seated behind you. You might cause another crash as you crane around but it’s a welcome touch, especially for VR.
Our first passenger was our trainer. We can’t remember his name, we’ll just call him Mr Tutorial, who’d sold his business to us so he could head off-world. At least, that was his plan. He was telling us about how to record shady passengers and turn in them for reward, and made a few clearly false sample statements, thinking the recording device was a dud.
Only it wasn’t, and as he left the taxi in our barely capable hands, he also left us with the “evidence” needed to turn him into the authorities for a $500 reward. Given that he charged us $7,500 to buy the company and taxi, we’d be getting a significant discount. We’ll let you guess what conclusion we came to.
But, while that encounter left us with a big grin, the next passenger had us all-but-blubbing. It was a small child who’d been abandoned by their parents but was somehow convinced they were coming back. It was heart-breaking having to make conversation them knowing, from an adult perspective, they’d been abandoned.
And that’s just the tip of the taxiberg. The Last Taxi promises plenty more encounters and, now that Elden Ring has started to release its grip on us, we’ll be diving right back in for more. We’re looking forward to discovering what moral quandaries and suspect activities it’ll throw our way and, if we so choose, let us to profit from. We’re sure that our morally-bereft choices won’t come back to bite us in any way, shape or form.
The Last Taxi is out now for PC, developed and published by ZenFri Inc. It’s available through Steam, priced at £22.99, with a 10% launch discount. It requires an HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Valve Index or other Steam VR compatible headset (we used an Oculus Quest 2 with a link cable).
