The player has a choice of four or eight (Four characters are unlockables) cab drivers; they're depended on speed and handling. The main objective of the game is to pick up a passenger and take him or her to his or her desire location at fast as possible. Many gameplay elements come into play, making the gameplay giving more depth than originally preceived. A new element was introduced in Crazy Taxi 2, the "Crazy Hop," it's a jump mechanic that helps the player jump over huge traffic jams and get through short cuts. The player will start with fifty seconds, it can be increase once the player starts picking up costumers and dropping them off as fast as possible.
The game takes place in two cities that are heavily based on New York. Costumers will be hanging around the city, waiting for the player to pick them up and take them to their desire location. There multiple types of costumers to pick up that are categorizes in different colors - it represents their difficulty.
New to the series is the ability to pick up two to four costumers at once. A ranking will be to the player once the player drops off the costumers. Depending on how fast the player gets to the location that the costumers wants to get to, will determine the ranking. The "Speedy" rank will give the player an extra five seconds added to the game clock, the "Normal" rank will give the player an extra two seconds, and the "Bad" rank will give the player no extra time. The player also must be careful on how to approach the costumer, if the player approaches too close, the costumer will run a few feet away from the player causing for a few seconds to wasted on the costumer getting into the cab. As a matter of fact, the cabbie will tell the costumer to hurry up and get in the car.
Stunts can be perform in the game to earn more cash. The "Crazy Through" is a near miss, if the player passes by a car, the amount of money that will be giving to the player will be increase by fifty-cents.
It will increase even further if the player keeps it up; as for multiple costumers, the bonuses can be multiple by the number of passengers the player has. The "Crazy Drift" is a drift mechanic that will help the in certain situations, the drift mechanic can be use to turn the cabbie 360 degrees or earn more cash by drifting. The "Crazy Boost" is a boost mechanic, it will help the cabbie get to its maximum acceleration. Another new mechanic to the Crazy Taxi series, is the "Crazy Hop," it is use to jump over huge traffic jams or jump on top of roof-tops (Short cuts).
