Gameplay
Game plays similarly to crazy taxi. Same loop of get thing, follow route, stop, get cash money. Unlike crazy taxi though time does not extend when you do a delivery. I was doing deliveries as fast as possible at the max speed and using boost but I could only ever get 4 or so of the high payout deliveries each game because the time is hard set to 2 minutes of total game time.
In single player you play against an AI (which got stuck several times and only got 1 delivery done in 2 minutes lmao).
Game in 2 player should be more fun but I didn't test it because I was only there for 3 games and then left.
The bike feels extremely slow even at top speed (I guess that is fine because it is a bike) but even when using boost it took quite a bit to reach each place and pedaling had a cap of how fast you could pedal (about 1 full rotation of the pedals per second) and pedaling faster didn't speed you up.
The boost has a ui indicator when you use it that says pedal faster. Pedaling faster does nothing :(
There were short cuts littered around the map which were orange boxes like where you pickup and drop off food. Just grazing these automatically snaps you into the shortcut and orients the bike correctly which is good but could be an issue if you accidentally graze it and end up going the wrong way you didn't want to go.
Game has no leaderboard. Would be so much better if the time limit wasn't hard set and if there was competition. Would actually make the game do so much better.
Genuinely this game has so much potential but I asked the mech there and he opened the test menu and none of the game settings could be changed as they were grayed out.
Visuals
Game looks great imo. 1080p monitors (which at the distance you are viewing them is perfectly fine) and the art in this game looks fine. Low poly but good colors and not too distracting.
UI is fine and the navigation is actually quite good. It will even use the shortcuts laid around the level if it is faster.
Entire UI is in English but the instruction cards, marquee, and general branding were still in Japanese. I saw a kid come up and he was confused about how to play the game because he was trying to read the Japanese instruction cards. I explained it to him and he then understood.
The in game attract loop still references the JP coin mech lmao. The same kid above then got confused about putting in coins and his dad came over and helped him swipe.
Audio
Cab was extremely quiet so I couldn't tell very well about audio. Seems to have an almost MKDX style announcer lol.
Couldnt hear music track
Controls
The game uses a pretty heavily modified bike frame. The lower half including the wheels is covered in this very brittle crappy feeling orange plastic that I would describe as “feeling like the corner caps of older heat up hockey units”. Basically feels like if it got poked it would instantly crack.
The bike pedals have a very wide radius which would be fine on a normal bike but because of the range of how the seat adjusts if you are over 5’ 4” you will slam your knees on the handlebars if making a sharper than 5° turn. Size I would recommend for this game is 4,4” - 5,4” if you don't want to have a bad time.
There are brakes on the handle bars. They do stuff in game but literally are not used lmao. You can play this game going full speed without breaking once since the bike turns fast enough to cut sharp corners at the pitiful max speed. Didn't have time to see if there was any break boost tech like crazy taxi has with its braking and shifting for boosts on specific characters.
The boost button oh the boost button. Little red button. doesn't tell you in game that it is for boost, you can only see that it is for boost on the attract sequence.
The bike clearly is an exercise bike or modified to be an exercise bike underneath the plastic. It has resistance on the pedals but basically nothing. I personally ride a Giant Escape 3 and the resistance on this bike feels like riding in 1,5 gear ratio on a downhill (For non bike people basically barely any work to go max speed in this game).
The seat is adjustable. About 4 inches of adjustment can be made by a motorized mechanism which has buttons on the back of the bike. It moves extremely slowly to adjust it and it wont let you adjust it mid game. Even on the highest setting it was still pretty uncomfortable to bike and I am 6’ 2”.
This game is also too large for young children even though it is very much marketed as a children's game. Children under 4’ 2” would reach the pedals fine if the seat is lowered fully and if the pedals are half way turned but because they have such a large radius their feet would slip off when the pedal reaches the bottom of its turn.
Namco Gripes
Namco put literally the bare minimum into this location test. They translated the game and that's about it.
This game has so much potential if they marketed it correctly and made some cab modifications to better fit America. I also saw in the test menu that there was a section for card dispensing and ic card testing (This would be amazing as a workout tracking tool for hardcore gamers like me who would love to see how many calories they burn [they already show the calories burned at the end of each game] delivering fake food in a biking game).
Genuinely it seems like namco just wants to see if the idea alone will sell this game before they even think about making a cab revision and in the state it is in right now it wont do that. This game can keep your attention for 2 minutes and then you will never play it again because 1. No one wants to workout at an arcade and 2. There is no incentive to play more than once (such as logins for fitness tracking, leaderboards, other modes, etc). Genuinely would love to see this idea expanded on and actually done effectively for an American audience but for now it is most likely gonna fail the location test and we will never see another mention of this game in America.