Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom review for PC

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that’s made me feel quite so old as Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom.

In theory, it shouldn’t. I mean, it’s meant to be a love letter to N64-style 3D platformers. With its gaudy colours, odd controls, and general focus on collecting things, it looks and in some ways plays like a game that could’ve come out during the fifth generation of video games. Going solely by dates, that should hit me right in the nostalgia.

But the reality is slightly different. Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom may look like it came out on N64 or PS1, but it plays and feels more like an old game filtered through a much more modern sensibility – think of it as N64 by way of memes, if you will.

This is clear right from the get-go, when your taxi is met by Morio, an Italian plumber that has no connection whatsoever to Nintendo who yells gibberish at you that kinda, sorta resembles instructions. This sets the tone for the rest of the game, as you’re constantly running into characters that look like they emerged from the pits of sketchy message boards, with even more instructions that seem like they’re equal parts nonsense and useful. It’s all the sort of thing that feels like it was made to be streamed on Twitch or YouTube, rather than played by actual humans.

My bigger problem with Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, though, is that the gameplay seems more geared towards being wacky than being enjoyable. There’s no jump button, and yet you have to constantly jump across gaps if you want to get anywhere. The game overcomes this self-imposed limitation by giving you a spin button that launches you forward quickly, and it’s up to you to make sure there’s a ramp or a bouncy object nearby that will give you an upwards boost. Again, it might be fun to watch someone else flailing around a level, trying – and more often than not failing – to reach weirdly placed levels and flying across bizarre chasms, but in terms of playing, it feels more frustrating than anything else. Add on to that those aforementioned nonsense instructions, and you can see why the game feels it was made for streaming rather than playing.

To be sure, Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom isn’t the first game that tries so hard to be wacky, nor would I begrudge developers who want a game that’s popular among streamers. But I can’t say that the end result is all that fun – not when there are all kinds of genuinely good modern 3D platformers out there that don’t rely nearly as much on silly gimmicks.

Those Awesome Guys provided us with a Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom PC code for review purposes.