Yaris

"Free, but intensely unplayable"

To sum up my reaction after completion of the first track of this game, I will use a phrase intensely familiar to any denizen of an online community. This phrase is WTF.

Seriously, this game must have been an evil joke concocted by the evil minds at Microsoft and Toyota. Yes, I said Toyota. This free game is essentially an interactive advertisement for the Toyota Yaris vehicle. You play as a “souped up” version of one of these cars. Souped up in this sense means that your vehicle is has suddenly sprouted a strange antennae-like device capable of shooting projectiles at bizarre enemies as your proceed down a track that is essentially a long tube object. WTF indeed.

There is little evidence pointing to sanity in Toyota's case in making an incredibly strange area for this object of promotion to combat… in. Why make a game where your car sprouts a giant gun? They could have easily made a Cruisin' USA type of game, instead they took it to an extremely weird territory not seen by many other games. The only other game that comes into this territory that comes to mind is probably Sneak King.

Sure the game is free, but the developers could have put at least some effort into making the game playable. It becomes nigh impossible to actually control your vehicle because of the fact that you have to worry about moving a little cursor with the right joystick around to follow enemies while at the same time on the other joystick. It becomes conflicting and at points impossible to accomplish the tracks safely because of this mechanism. The game isn't a real racer, it's on rails so you also have to move the left joystick forward to accelerate faster. Why this is set up as such is beyond me, but I'm assuming because of the budget factor of this game, not much effort was spent into playability testing.

It consists of several levels, which really aren't much different from one another. In fact they look exactly the same, save for the different enemies and course design. They are filled with coins which can be collected to upgrade a few factors of your Yaris, but of course this is limited as well. The enemies range from very strange Star Fox-like drones to Sumo Wrestlers on minibikes. To me just everything about the game is bad.

Now of course you can't go expecting much graphically and sonically in a game such as this, and notably this game also suffers in this area. Save for the next-gen resolution, the game is running on some Nintendo 64-esque graphics. The cars in Ridge Racer 64 looked just as good as or better than these Yaris ones. The sound consists of a pulsating rhythm that gets on your nerves almost as much as the controls.

In the end, the game might be free but it's really not worth the hard drive space on your 360. Seriously, Pocketbike Racer is a better and more rewarding racing game than this. It might be worth it for either masochists, or those looking for a quick laugh at how strange and unworthy a game this is.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 02/22/08

Game Release: Yaris (US, 10/10/07)