MiLE HiGH TAXi

I've spent time with a lot of arcade-heritage games chasing that quarter-eating Dreamcast high, and MiLE HiGH TAXi is one of the more honest attempts at it. Solo developer Cassius John-Adams built the whole thing himself, which sets expectations correctly: this is a tight, focused arcade loop, not a feature-rich commercial release. The pitch is simple - fare-attack gameplay lifted from the Crazy Taxi era, but rotated 90 degrees into the sky above a dense futuristic city that wears its Fifth Element influences without apology, right down to in-world Multi-Pass advertisements. The core mechanic is pick-up and drop-off against a countdown clock, and the twist that makes it worth discussing is verticality. You are not navigating flat streets. Destinations are tagged by floor number across a city block spanning over 50 floors, and managing altitude with the right analog stick is where the skill ceiling actually lives. Overshoot your target floor and you lose seconds clawing back down; undershoot and the slow upward drift bleeds your timer. The open airspace sounds easier than Crazy Taxi's traffic-choked roads, and on Easy difficulty it genuinely is - reviewers noted the lower difficulty settings produce a slow, almost passive experience. The correct entry point is Normal, where speed and the altitude puzzle combine into something genuinely satisfying once it clicks. Sequential mode, which chains passengers in a fixed order with time bonuses per delivery, is the strongest of the three modes and where the game shows its best decision-making pressure. Standard mode replicates the classic free-form Crazy Taxi structure. Free Roam exists but offers minimal purpose beyond route memorization. The quality-of-life situation is where a solo project's seams show clearly. Settings reset to defaults on every launch - meaning you have to disable motion blur and re-invert vertical controls each session. The mini-map tilts during altitude changes, making it temporarily unreadable at the exact moment you most need it. Navigation routing occasionally bugs and points back to the pickup location rather than the destination. The voice acting is uneven, audio layers can stack unpleasantly, and the options menu is thin: three graphics settings, no resolution control, no audio sliders. On the positive side, the game runs on very modest hardware - the developer reports playability on integrated Intel UHD 640 graphics - and on a capable PC the framerate is rock solid. The visuals intentionally echo late-1990s polygon aesthetics, which lands somewhere between charming and rough depending on your tolerance. Steam user sentiment sits at a mixed 61 percent across around 70 reviews, which feels about right. The game is not broken - the core loop works and the concept is genuinely novel in an era drowning in flat-map open-world drivers. What it is, is thin. The city lacks distinct landmarks, making trips blur together after extended sessions. There are no unlockables, no character progression, no mod tools, and no multiplayer. The free Race Mode DLC added after launch provides some additional replayability, but this was always designed as a 10-to-30-minute pick-up-and-play arcade experience - which the developer stated directly. Approached on those terms, the frustrations shrink and the fun per session ratio holds up.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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