Rollin' rollin' rollin, keep those cabbies rollin!A rolling ball gathers many passengers
It's always a good sign if an iPhone / iPod game can manage to keep your attention for more than ten minutes. With so many games to choose from, and even with the best will in the world (and keeping my games "pages" on the iPod Touch down to 4 or less), it's far too easy to flit between everything you've bought without sticking with one particular title for too long.
If you're still playing a game after more than an hour you're talking about a potential "keeper".
More than two hours and you have probably discovered that rare beast, one of those hidden gems scattered around the iTunes store that genuinely makes superb use of the device, looks absolutely spankingly good in the visuals department, and is excellent fun. Enter stage left: Taxiball.
I've long been a lover of pixel art, particularly anything that gathers together cute little detailed buildings and people into an isometric cityscape seething with detail. So browsing through various iPhone gaming sites, Taxiball caught my eye with its visuals straight off the bat.
A quick shufty at the iTunes store revealed that developers Self Aware Games had got quite a few other things right too. Firstly, the game has a lite version (available
here) which offers a really good chunk of the actual game itself.
Secondly, the
full game costs a mere £1.19 so it's not going to break the bank either.
Taxiball puts together a fairly lunatic premise. You're running a taxi company - with balls! Yep, your passengers willingly balance atop your giant yellow spherical transportation device. Getting passengers from A to B involves tilting the iPhone / iPod, rolling the ball around to drop each customer off at their chosen destination. Think "Crazy Taxi" and you'll get the general idea of what's expected of you.
All the fun of the fare
The game is utterly deliciously presented, first winning you over with that excellent visual style, then massaging your eardrums with some absolutely perfectly suited human beatbox music (supplied by a genius mouth magician called Wes Carroll (in fact go and check his website out at www.mouthdrumming.com, it's a hoot!).
Slick intro screens and a satisfyingly in-depth tutorial ease you into the gameplay as smooth as butter, so before long you're confidently rolling up, rolling over your passengers and rolling off with only the tilt and roll gameplay mechanic to worry about.
Though Taxiball is essentially quite a simple game, it's not without a fair bit of challenge. Each passenger needs to get where they've got to go within a set time limit - and there's a time limit for each level overall. Keep dropping your passengers off and keeping them happy, and use your allocated time wisely to reap the highest rewards (and of course the biggest scores).
However, if you're ham-fisted and don't take care to drive your "cab" in a responsible manner, slamming your passengers into buildings or obstacles, or dropping 'em in the drink and they'll eventually do a runner, leaving you with no fare and a disgruntled customer.
Fare's fare!
Each of Taxiball's seven different cities comes crammed with tightly designed streets to navigate your way around, plus a whole plethora of other obstacles to be aware of. You'll find patches of road that will flash with tiny directional arrows, either aiding or hindering your progress depending on which way you're rolling. There are stretches of water to leap across, using handy spring-loaded platforms. There are also hazardous stretches of ice, and rough grass that can again cause you to lose vital seconds, or lose control of your Taxiball altogether.
From the tutorial through nOObsville, Hometown and beyond, you'll find that Taxiball's environments are diverse but always superbly put together. Though the game may sound like it could end up being repetitive, there are a whole host of achievement-style "Awards" to play for (with a nice line in humour threading through them for good measure) and once you've played and unlocked each city, you've always got the option to go back and see if your newly-acquired "knowledge" can't net you better results next time. Self Aware Games have promised future updates will add new awards and challenges, so it could turn into a serious long-term grower. We like!
Best of all though, Taxiball allows you to synch up an online profile so that your best times and monetary scores can be stored for a bit of e-peen measuring online against the rest of the world. Online score systems are still something of a quirky rarity in games, so it's nice to see the facility offered here, and done properly with a friends system (so you can measure your score directly against your chums) and a proper global score table for a bit of international infamy.
One more fare-ly awful pun and I'm outa here!
At the top of the review I made mention of the fact that a good iPhone / iPod game shows its pedigree by being a "Keeper" and Taxiball definitely is. Beautifully splicing together a superb graphical look and feel, a fitting soundtrack, all the options you'd expect from a more expensive app (including a really good calibration screen so those of you who like a bit of lazy gaming in bed are well served, hurrah!)
If you're tired of ball-rolling games not quite living up to expectations on the iPhone then it's your sworn duty to go and grab this. Games and developers of this calibre are what's needed to stem the flow of rubbish shovelware that seems to be creeping onto the iTunes store. Indulge yourself with a truly classy roll-'em-up game destined to become a cult hit, and deservedly so.
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(1) (30/07) 
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#1 - NewYork - on 28/05/2009 at 21:27 wrote:
#2 - peej - on 29/05/2009 at 08:07 wrote:
#3 - NewYork - on 30/05/2009 at 09:04 wrote:
#4 - peej - on 01/06/2009 at 08:11 wrote:
Nice that we got a mention on the Taxiball page too! Rock on!