The resurgence of 3D platformers in the indie and alternative development sphere has left me a bit cold. While a lot of developers get the general mechanics of the genre, nailing the actual feel of their inspirations is often missed. It takes more than chunky polygons and a jump button.
The demo of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom suggested to me that it was going to be kind of the same. The difference is that, while some of the platformers I had played I just didn’t really like very much, this one was at least going to be a hyperactive good time.
Weirdly, while the mechanics of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom are somewhat unique to the genre and the sugar-charged movement system seems contrary to what is typically expected, the flavor of early-3D platformers is one of the things it gets down perfectly.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Panik Arcade
Publisher: Those Awesome Guys
Released: April 9, 2024
MSRP: $16.99
The collectathon platformer seemed to die out way too soon. Super Mario 64 cemented the standards in 1996, Banjo-Kazooie was already making fun of those standards by 1998, and by 2001, Conker’s Bad Fur Day was telling us that those standards were no longer enough. A lot of the games that followed in the genre are mostly forgettable. Maybe Conker had a point.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a lot more hyperactive than anything of the early-3D era. You play as the eponymous yellow taxi, which is unique because it runs using a spring rather than fossil fuels. Tolsa and its leader Alien Mosk have corrupted the oil supply, and now every other vehicle on the planet has become evil. Being the only incorruptable mode of transportation, it’s up to you to collect all the green gears scattered about.
It’s a pretty recognizable framework from there. You start out with one world accessible to you, and as you collect more gears, you unlock more levels. There are also coins, but the only use for money here is to buy cosmetic hats. That’s it for collectibles.
That’s certainly not to say that Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is just an imposter reading from an old script. It distinguishes itself in a couple of major ways. The first is that you don’t increase your taxi’s abilities as you advance; the only thing that improves is your skill with handling it. The second is that there is no jump button.
That’s not to say you can’t jump, it just isn’t as simple as pressing a button and seeing your taxi hop. Instead, you have to learn various ways to get your wheels from platform to platform, and up vertical climbs. After all, if everything was at ground level, it would neither be much fun, nor a platformer.
What you can do is a Flip-o-Will, which is essentially just a dash. However, it can be used to traverse gaps, break your fall, or, when performed on an incline, launch you into the atmosphere. You can also “dash interrupt” by pressing the button again before your car shoots off, and that will flip your car over. When you land on your roof, you’ll bounce and can either dash from there or interrupt again to go further upwards. Finally, you can hit the brakes before dashing to backflip, which pops you up higher, but going backwards. Knowing when, where, and how to use your dash is key to getting anywhere.
As I said, it’s a skill that requires building on. Knowing how to manipulate the physics and hit the reverse or accelerator takes time to get a feel for. And when you do, it feels great, but you’ll have to continue refining your abilities to get to every last gear. Or at least as many as you need to complete the game.
The worlds have a great deal of variety to them. Some are basically obstacle courses, some are mostly about exploration, while others have a system similar to Crazy Taxi, where you need to pick up fares to extend your timer. On the latter type levels, it really isn’t as intrusive as it may sound. When there isn’t a fare around, you can just pick up clocks, and you can easily build up the minutes in your reserve.
However, it does give you the opportunity to interact with the weird characters who populate the world. These range from dogs to bodybuilders who hold their breath and don’t work their legs. The dialogue and humor is one of the weaker aspects of Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. It’s every bit as hyperactive as the gameplay, but the jokes are all over the place. Your handler is Morio, and the antagonist is Alien Mosk, but that’s as far as they really go with parody. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just silly.
And silly is alright. It lands occasionally, like the hectic gym sub-world. It, at the very least, doesn’t lean on self-parody.
It works a lot better visually. Not just in the environmental gags, but overall. While its appearance doesn’t conform to the limitations of the N64 that inspired it, its retro 3D stylings and obnoxiously bright colors are appealing in a Katamari Damacy sort of way.
On the other hand, I live for the sound design. I’m not really an ears person, but everything about the way Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom sounds is appealing. From the fanfare music that introduces a stage to the way it screams “Psychotic!” at you whenever you deliver a fare quickly, everything fits so well. The soundtrack is similarly diverse, including some tracks that sound like they’re lost tunes from Super Mario Galaxy to the gym backing of “Head and shoulders, knees and toes and knees and toes and knees.”
While playing, I found a number of the gears to be frustratingly out of reach for me. Simply finding them all is quite a feat, so I figured I wouldn’t even try to reach for all 250 of them. Then I finished the game, and immediately returned to some of the earlier levels to completely sweep them of the collectables. I might not be done yet.
What I mainly took away from Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is that its creators had a lot of fun crafting it. There’s a lot of love poured into it, and it shows in all the small ways it goes the unnecessary extra mile. It’s surprisingly polished, even if there is the odd frustrating moment of fighting with the physics. It just feels like a complete, uncompromised package that succeeds in what it sets out to do.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
