Experdize Taxi Driver

How to play: you are a cab driver in a real city — the roads, their names, the buildings and the addresses all come from OpenStreetMap. Up (or W) is the throttle, down brakes and reverses, and left and right steer; steering bites hardest at middling speed. Somebody is waving at the green ring: drive into it and stop, and they will walk over, open the door and get in. They then name a real address out loud, and from there the game tells you the way — a spoken turn-by-turn instruction across the top of the screen, one at a time, counting down to the turn — spoken as well as written. Follow it. Take the shift's target over the level's fares and you keep the night; miss it and you drive it again.

The rules of the road are real ones. Traffic lights and stop signs are live, and the instruction turns red when you have to stop; running one costs you the gratuity and draws attention. Every street has a limit, shown beside your speed. You cannot leave the road — the kerb holds the cab in, and grinding along it costs you the tip. Clip another car and you can carry on, but each shunt counts: enough of them and the shift is over as too many accidents.

The five shifts add one thing each. Level one is the fares and the rules of the road. Level two puts a patrol car out: speed, jump a light or shunt people often enough and it comes after you — outrun it, or stop and take the ticket. And it gets worse every level. They read the streets better, they keep at it for longer, from level three another unit may pick you up the moment you have shaken the first, and from level four a car that sits on you long enough boxes you in and tickets you whether you stop or not. By the night shift there are two more units behind the first and losing them is very hard indeed — taking the ticket is often the cheaper way back to work. Level three gives you a fuel gauge, and the dispatcher sends you to a filling station when it runs low; the fuel comes out of your takings. Level four adds the car wash, because nobody tips a filthy cab. Level five adds the garage: every shunt slows the cab and adds to the bill, and the more you have hit, the more it costs to put right.

2D or 3D is the camera.C — or the camera button on the meter and in the row below — steps three ways of looking at the city. 3D chase, behind the cab, is where this game is played; 3D cockpit is from the driver's seat, where the seat is on the side that city actually drives on; and 2D map is the north-up street plan, the only view where the road names are legible and the one to plan a route in. The 3D views are the road itself: real buildings with shopfronts at street level, sunlight and shadow, traffic, street lights, pedestrians and the cab you chose. Q and E let you crane round to check a junction before you commit to it, and P — or the pause button on the meter — stops the shift dead, clock and all, until you resume. On a phone, the left pair of buttons steers and the right pair is the brake and the throttle.

Your cab, and everybody in the street. The Cab row on the setup card picks which car you drive from the ones the site has; your fare, and every pedestrian on the pavement, is a real character model from the same catalogue the restaurants and the hotels cast from. The dispatcher reads every instruction out loud and your fare speaks for themselves — the two are different voices, and the Voice slider in the sound menu is what governs both.