Day Four: Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom
Petition to replace Santa's sleigh with a little taxi
HEY HEY Come on over have some fun with Yellow Taxi!
As a diametric opposite to yesterday’s brown communist shooter, we got a colorful capitalist cab driving game. It’s cab-italist. I promise the game’s a lot better than my awful puns.
Keep reading to find out why you Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom! Is a short game you should check out!
What is it?
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom! Is a collectathon platformer where you play as a little taxi. You drive around levels completing platforming challenges to collect gears, which are like the stars in a 3D Mario game. Mario with a car. Super Cario. I’m going to get arrested for these.
The platforming is intuitive and easy to learn. You press the gas button to accelerate forward, and steer like a car. The steering is very responsive, with very little technicality to it, which is perfect for the kind of platforming you’ll do. There’s no jump button, but you can press the boost button to dash forward. You use this to fly off ramps. You can also press the boost twice to flip out and get a makeshift jump. If you press the brake button while charging the boost, you flip out even higher, which works like Mario’s backflip jump. This small tool set is used in creative ways with some great level design.
Each stage is an open-ended area where you can explore. Some stages let you roam around and find gears, while others have a Crazy Taxi style mechanic where you pick up passengers and drop them off at their destination. These give you gears, but they also give you additional time, since these stages are limited by a timer. This timer mechanic ties into the game very well. Since you’re playing as a taxi, it forces you to do what taxis do, ferry people around. The limited time also justifies the game’s visual design, since the car you play is a little wind-up toy car, and the timer represents him winding down, so you have to keep it going.
There’s a lot of platforming to do, and it’s a lot of fun. The jumping puzzles are designed like tiny little race tracks, with ramps and corners. You drive around them, timing your boosts and braking in mid-air to make precise jumps. There are secrets, too, which make clever use of the simple mechanics.
Each stage is full of weird characters that ask you to do things. You can talk to bodybuilders, hyperactive corgis and even the King of Pepperoni. It’s a surrealist madcap world with a zany sense of humor.
It’s a game that’s fun from the moment you pick it up. It throws you into a little tutorial world, teaches you some moves, then it sets you loose on a real stage where you can explore and get to know the controls at your own pace. The challenges are varied and creative, and the controls feel smooth and responsive.
Short
The game takes around 5 hours to complete, which is a long car ride, but still short compared to most other games. Throughout its runtime, you’ll visit over a dozen colorful stages, each with their own sub-worlds, hidden challenges and mini-games. There’s also a time attack mode, optional challenges in the hub world and a Crazy Taxi mini-game where you pick people up and drop them off for as long as you can.
There’s a lot to do, lots of variety, and it’s all well thought out. Every challenge riffs on the game’s central mechanics in interesting ways, so you’ll get a fresh experience that doesn’t drift too far from what the game is about. It shows off a lot in 5 hours, and it doesn’t run out of gas.
Worse Graphics
Yellow Taxi goes for a deliberately retro look, inspired by platformers like Super Mario Sunshine, with its bright, saturated blues and sunny look. The color palette and pixel art style it uses for the textures reminds me of a high-budget Gameboy Advance game, in the best way possible. The models are low poly, with interesting low-res textures. Everything is stylized very well, which makes for characters that look funny and endearing at the same time.
I really like the Yellow Taxi’s design. It’s a stubby, smashed and slammed version of a regular taxi cab, with fun proportions. It reminds me of the Choro Q games, which also feature tini, chibi-fied cars. I used to play those games a lot as a kid, so this game succeeds with its nostalgia on several fronts.
The graphics are really charming. They’re simple, readable, and very cute. It’s more proof that a solid art style can look good, even if it’s simple.
The music also reminds me of the Choro Q games. A lot of bright, upbeat synth music with the nostalgic synth twang of old Japanese games. Sadly, The Offspring isn’t on the soundtrack.
Made by People Paid More to Work Less
Yellow Taxi was made by Panik Arcade, an indie development team from Italy made up of two guys, Matteo and Lorenzo. They announced the game in 2023 and released it a year later. I don’t think they only worked on it for one year, but I don’t have any concrete figures. After the release of Yellow Taxi, they made CloverPit, a Balatro-inspired slot machine roguelike that became a massive hit. This game made them an undisclosed, but very large, amount of money.
Making games with your friend, with full creative freedom, and getting a smash hit, too. Sounds like they got paid more, to work less. Beats an office gig, I bet.
Conclusion
You should definitely play Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom! Everyone should. It’s fun for all ages and skill levels. It’s easy to pick up and play, and it offers enough fun movement to keep you entertained for a while. The game is short, but it gets the most out of its driving mechanics in that amount of time. You’ll see a lot of it, but not enough to tyre you out. Get it? Like a car tire?
The game’s driving isn’t too complicated. In fact, it’s more like a platformer with tank controls. That was my plan all along! To convince you to play something with tank controls! They’re not so bad, eh? Everyone called me crazy when I said they were still a viable control method! Who’s laughing now? Probably no one after reading these terrible car puns.
You can hop into Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom! For a fare of $17, but it goes on sale often for half. At the time of writing this, it’s on sale for $8.49. That’s an easy buy.