Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom Review

thesixthaxis.com:

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