Yaris

"This game is awful. And I like to eat Lunchables’ Cheese Pizza with the Capri Sun and the mini Snickers bar."

Believe or not, there is a game out there called Yaris that is ABSOUTELY POSITIVELY FREE to download off of Xbox Live that can award you up to two-hundred Gamerpoints. And it's clearly one of the worst games available for the Xbox 360. If you are so bored to read a review for a game that's free to play, well…keep on reading. I like to entertain my readers.

Yaris is a game all about Toyota's new little compact car, the self-named Yaris. Kind of like a Burger King restaurant, you fire this game up to a clean menu with all sorts of clever quotations, such as “Watch out for the toaster. You might get burned.” and other hip-hop tunes. You can advance through the game's basic Campaign mode or jump online and play against friends in one of the game's eight courses.

For a game focused on a single model of a Japanese sedan, I would expect this to be a generic racing game where you race in your Yaris against other Yarises around Tsukuba Circuit or something like that. No such thing. Instead, you are warped into some futuristic environment where you drive a Yaris at high speed through a bunch of dull, gray tunnels, defying gravity and not crashing at all. It gets better. Your Yaris is equipped with a tentacle-like appendage through the hood that shoots lasers at enemies, such as flying iPods, toasters with legs, and luchadors on motorcycles. Seriously, Toyota pulled the most unusual concept out of the hat, and despite being "out there," it's not very remarkable.

But nonetheless, you can enjoy your limited acid trip until you can't take it anymore. This game plays out like other action shooter games, such as S.T.U.N. Runner and Space Harrier where blast through tunnels with cruise control and move around the halfpipe while using the other joystick to aim a cursor at bad guys and shoot them down. It's that simple. The Yaris careens around the track like a brick on ice—normal physics need not apply as you can swing around without any loss of speed or grip (you can't even go up the half-pipes and catch air, what a jip). On the course lies tons of coins which you can pick up and buy a few meager items to unlock. But overall, the goal is to survive three laps—get hit by an enemy or a stationary object and you'll lose shield power. Lose all your power and you'll drive around in circles until you “die.” Awesome.

While shooting down a few iPods is funny at first, the difficulty steps up in the later stages. Eventually, tons and tons of mindless drones will fly in front of you, littering the middle of the half-pipe with suppressing fire. It's impossible to shoot them all down. The counter—drive on the side or the ceiling of the half-pipe. You literally have to do this to have a chance of surviving and you can go from full health to none at all in the blink of an eye, which is very frustratig. In even later levels, the game will start to pick up on your dirty habit and thrust you to the middle of the half-pipe over and over again in order to finish you off, meaning you hold left and pray you can stay out of harm's way. You also can't “outrun” enemies either—they will always match your speed and stay in your face until they are defeated. However, for some strange reason, if you slow down, the enemies will not take as many shots at you, making the game so much easier. The gameplay feels awfully broken. Unlike the classic S.T.U.N. Runner, skill doesn't really help dispatch of enemies as quickly as it should. You die randomly all the time.

This is one of those games that makes about as little sense as Big Rigs. You'll definitely need to unwind after playing this game. On the contrary, this game does one thing well—it has a decent sense of speed as you blow through the game's bland tunnels. And the multiplayer in which two players compete for the highest score isn't that bad, but you won't find anyone online besides achievement boosters.

The graphics are lousy. Every element of this game is incredibly bland. The Yarises themselves look like a shiny box out of a Nintendo 64 game, the tunnels are all the same color with little variety, and enemies fly by in the same choppy animations. The texturing on everything is dulled down. Framerate drops occasionally when many enemies clutter the screen. The laser shots look more like a BB gun than anything. You'd swear this looks like a novice programmer's freshman project and having been spoiled by games such as Call of Duty 4 and Forza 2, the sight burned my eyes on my hi-definition TV. The sound consists of some awfully generic electronica, the “pew pew” of the lasers, and a Japanese guy who was “Yaris, by Toyota” in the lowest voice possible. Ugh.

Sure, you could have some fun with this game, but when the game isn't boring, it's terribly frustrating. Of course, you can always check it out for yourselves—and cringe. The achievements aren't very friendly either, so unless you are persistent, just say no to the free two-hundred points. Thankfully, you don't need to pay any money for it, so just check it out if you're curious. Now where did I put my Snickers bar...

Presentation: 5/10 – The Burger King quotes here and there save what would be a bleached-bland menu.
Gameplay: 2/10 – Dumbest action shooter you've ever played. Sense of speed just barely helps this game out.
Graphics: 3/10 – Basically an N64 game except with the obnoxious 360 turtle wax dumped on the whole package.
Sound: 4/10 – This game has sound and it doesn't make me want to strangle anybody. And that's about it.
Replay Value: 4/10 – Eight tracks with Xbox Live. That's about it. It's free, though!

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/24/08, Updated 06/25/08

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