Experience the pulse of a buzzing metropolis with all the good (and not so good) stuff that happens: the traffic jams, harsh weather, bumpy roads, impatient passengers, and the occasional accident. Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator will task players to drive clients, hire personnel, maintain a fleet of cars and manage the business to build their transportation empire.

Off to new adventures, Simteract, the Polish studio behind the beloved Train Life: A Railway Simulator game, is hard at work developing the first-ever realistic ride-hailing tycoon: Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator. Their most ambitious game to date will feature an open-world 1:1 recreation of Barcelona using advanced city building, real-world data and complex AI traffic simulation systems.

In Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, you assume the role of a driver who starts working in the ride-hailing industry. At the onset, you only have one cheap car and can take up jobs for existing companies to earn more money and experience. You can open your own company and compete with others for market share in the long run.

Taxi jobs, food delivery, obeying driving rules, and random passengers’ wishes (fast trips to the city or slow and chatty to the mall) are just scratching the surface of what Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator has in store for you.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, revealed as Urban Venture in March 2022, gets a name overhaul and joins Nacon’s “Life” family.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator was previously announced as an early access title coming to PC later this year. Thanks to the newly signed partnership with Nacon, Simteract adjusted the development plans to release the game on PC and consoles straight into 1.0 version in 2023, dropping the early access model entirely.

Nacon’s Head of Marketing, David Talmat, explains taking in Taxi Life as an easy decision, “a great concept we know gamers will love, a great city to explore, and this concept of driving but also managing your company. This is exactly what we look to deliver in Life games.” 

“We realized we had an ambitious project at hand and turn to Nacon as we worked very well together on Train Life. Our goal with Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is to show the skills of our talented team, building a representation of Barcelona on a 1:1 scale that truly feels real; a chance for people to get a one-of-a-kind city driving sim experience,” explains Marcin Jaśkiewicz, CEO of Simteract. 

Offering a 1:1 recreation of the famous city of Barcelona — the second-largest city in Spain, after Madrid — the game features a playable area of at least 20 km2, with recreated parts of the real city and over 200 of its most famous landmarks, historical buildings, parks, and sculptures. If you never had the chance to visit Barcelona, this is your ticket there — but you might just have to earn your keep.   

The world of Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is a living and breathing place, with realistic traffic and pedestrians walking on the streets. The pedestrians aren’t only there for show; they influence gameplay. The weather is also a factor in how the world reacts. There are fewer people on the streets when it rains, and cars drive slower to prevent accidents.

Deep customization and management tools will help you custom-build the looks of your character, brand, cabin and maintain and upgrade your vehicles for better performance. Customers will rate the cleanliness of your vehicle and extra services, while the streets will punish you for carrying cheap tires. You’ll want to do a quick stop at the garage shop during lunch break to check your car’s vitals.

The life of a taxi driver can get tiresome. Once you know the streets, the rules of business, and have earned enough money and reputation, you can step aside to handle the corporate expansion; let your employed drivers bring home the bounty. Being a boss will come with challenges, such as dealing with problematic drivers, company finances, and real estate management. There’s no recipe for succeeding in a start-up; you’ll have to make adjustments along the way to compete for your market slice.   

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is a sandbox game where you get to choose how to play. You can decide to be a modern-day taxicab driver to earn money and experience points, or you can take on other challenges that the city has to offer while roaming in “free drive.”

In “free drive” mode, you can drive through the city without an official destination and gather collectibles while you explore.

Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator is coming to consoles and PC (Steam) in 2023.