A lot of games can lean heavily on having either great style or substance, with a rare few having both qualities together. Even rarer are the are the games that boast style and abundance – a sensory overload of bright visuals, bopping music, and a million different on-screen stimuli all going off at once. When I think of games like that, my mind goes toward the wacky eccentricity of a game like Katamari Damacy. In many ways, Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom takes that same abundance of wacky style and non-stop jams and applies it to a throwback collectathon platformer that I can’t get enough of.
The hero in Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom isn’t a ball-rolling space prince, or even any kind of humanoid. Instead, you control the titular taxi – a windup toy created by the legally distinct moustachioed man Morio. Because you’re wind-up powered and don’t run on oil, the yellow taxi is immune to the compromised oil epidemic caused by the evil company Tosla and their leader Alien Mosk. It’s almost embarrassingly on-the-nose, but I promise that’s as far as the game goes with that stuff. With your characters established, all you’ve got to do from there is collect green gears hidden across levels to unlock even more levels and, eventually, save the world.
There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the writing or world-building of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, but I love that. It throws things at the wall just to see what sticks, not too unlike how you’ll be flinging your taxi against walls and slopes and boxes as you zoom through each level. One stage might have you escorting bodybuilders and talking dogs Crazy Taxi-style to their destinations on a timer, while another stage will suddenly be a giant bowling-alley world with talking pin-people. Every few green gears you get unlocks a new level portal back in your hub world, but as you unlock more portals you’ll also find the hub itself expanding and offering access to new NPCs, challenges, and mini-levels. There’s a sprawling map of areas in the game, and each one is just as unpredictable as the last, making it a thrill each time I dropped into a new one and discovered what was going on there.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom boasts all the most familiar elements of an old-school 3D collectathon platformer, except for one – there is no jump button. Navigating the game requires you to use your Flip-o-Will dash to launch your yellow taxi across gaps and into ramps at the optimal angles and the right times to fling yourself around and up obstacles the same way a jump would.
It’s a bit confusing, at first. The physics of the game are pretty particular, so you’ll need to map out your timing and positioning just right for especially tricky platforms and jumps. Plus, you’ve got really precise ways to even further manipulate your positioning – you can cancel mid-dash to pause your momentum, or double tap the dash button to flip upside – which will allow you to bounce on the roof of your car for a short hop. You can even time your brake just right before a dash to backflip. I loved the feeling of slowly wrapping my head around the movement mechanics as I progressed through the game. Eventually, I went back to some of the earliest levels and used my finely honed abilities to track down hidden gears and secrets I didn’t even know existed my first time around.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is full of heart and passion – silly, silly passion. It’s a game that isn’t afraid to be weird just for the sake of it, but it’s also a game built around some of the sharpest and most innovative 3D platforming mechanics I’ve ever experienced. It’s a beautiful mix of oldschool ideas and flashy modern indie excellence, and by the time the credits rolled I was already itching to play it again.
