Developer/Publisher: Self Aware Games
Genre: Arcade/Strategy
Price: $0.99, FREE version also available
Verdict: Stop reading and go buy this now!
Pros: Fast paced gameplay, Tilt controls are spot on, Achievements
Cons: No Multiplayer, Levels lack variety

Move over Crazy Taxi, this cabbie’s got balls! Customers are in for one hell of a ride as you slam your way through city streets, jump over lakes and try to avoid ice patches, all in the name of dead presidents. Money is your main goal, and people don’t want to pay up unless you’ve managed to get them to their destination in a reasonable amount of time, unshaken and dry. The more time you take, more walls you slam into, and more swimming lessons you give your clients, the less dough they’ll cough up for your services.

Tilt controls are in full swing and may take some getting used to for new players, but once you get in the groove you’ll be speeding through alley ways and zipping around 90 degree turns in your sleep. One of the hardest things to get used to is holding the iPhone/iPod touch flat to put your ‘ball cab’ in neutral. TaxiBall offers a calibration for neutral position allowing you to have a slight tilt (if that’s more comfortable) without moving your ball. While calibrating for comfort may seem like a good idea, ultimately it ends up making it harder to control your ball, forcing you to compensate for the comfort tilt.

Things kick off quickly in the Tutorial, putting your ball on the street right from the start. Customers quickly frown upon you, dogs (yeah, you pick up dogs) crap on you if they’re unhappy with your rolling, and the relentless clock ticks away, as you run the maze that is the Tutorial. Upon unlocking at least one achievement in the Tutorial, you’ll progress to “nOObsville,” where the maze-like streets are even harder to  navigate. Tall grass, hills (running arrows on the ground) and ice litter the streets and keep you from making your fare. Things only get more complicated as you continue from city to city, narrowing streets and increasing obstacles, there definitely isn’t a lack of challenge.

Including the Tutorial and an unlockable “Friends with Benefits” city, there are seven playgrounds for you to navigate. While the cities don’t necessarily have a theme, individually they do have more of a specific type of obstacle, be it water, ice, hills or grass. This doesn’t exactly give much variety to the challenges, but it does give you more maze-like cities to try and memorize.

The more you play one city, the faster you’ll be zooming through the alleyways, and the less you’ll be pulling up the full map to find the quickest route to your destination. The map is a very valuable tool that you’ll need to utilize if you want to make the most money possible, that is, before you know the city like the back of your hand of course. Pulling the map up will pause your time and allow you to plan a route that avoids hazards, extra miles and possible dead ends.

One huge chunk of strategy is woven into the gameplay through colored circles. Each fare will have a circle around them that is one of three colors; green, yellow or red. Green fares are short fares that allot short time frames to get the job done, but they’re usually easy to finish. Yellow fares are slightly longer than the green fares, some times they’re just as short, but offer more money and more time to get to the destination. Lastly, red fares are the hardest tasks to accomplish, often requiring you to travel across the entire map in order to drop your rider off. The order in which you complete your fares could determine whether or not you’ll have time to complete the lot, and if you can’t grab all of the customers who want to ride on your big ball, you won’t make the bank.

You’ll want to get as much money as possible so you can keep up with your friends on the leader boards. Inviting friends to your list is an awesome feature that allows you to see all of their high scores for each city. Though it’s nice to be able to compare high scores with friends, it would have been even better to run fares right along side them. No multiplayer was integrated into TaxiBall, and while that doesn’t make the single player portion any less exciting, it does downplay the need to have a friend list.

Friend list aside, TaxiBall is an amazing game. Fares will have you both excited and frustrated at the same time for hours on end. It’s a constant race against the clock that will have you on the edge of your seat until each round is over. Achievements also keep you coming back for more, driving you to be better every game. Bravo to the team over at Self Aware Games for making the credits just as entertaining as the game its self!