One of the most "videogame-ass videogames" I've ever played. And we like those round here!

Pure unadulterated FUN that feels incredible to control and proudly wears it's influences and offbeat humor on it's sleeve!

Who knew the next big platformer mascot was a wee toy taxi?

This game has the exploration of Mario Odyssey, the good parts from 3D Sonic the Hedgehog, and a little bit of Crazy Taxi. This is the type of platformer where it teaches you how to play while you play. There's a definite skill factor to your movement and jumps that you'll learn over time. It's really satisfying to get the hang of.

First you start making use of level geometry to get around (like boosting on ramps to get height). But you soon realize there's jumps, double jumps, back flips, delayed jumps, special power ups, jumps to mid air dashes... these move sets are all available from the start, but you don't necessarily have the information on how to do them until later. And part of the fun is how the game gives you missions that tests your skills as using them.

Overall, a solid 4/5 game. Took me 10 hours to complete, getting about 1/3 of the side collectables.

I really only had a couple minor issues with the game:
- Switching to top down perspective: at certain points the camera switches to top down, and the controls are changes unnecessarily from pressing X or R2 to drive to using the d pad. There's no way to change this and made certain sections a bit more tedious than it needed to be.

- Like Crazy Taxi, you activate NPCs by driving into their "circles". However, YTGV requires you to be 99.9% in the circle before activating. Very minor annoyance, but it bugged me enough to jot it down.

Great game, highly recommend.

amazing movement, thanks coney

One of the most creative 3D platformers I've ever played. Cannot recommend this game enough.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a game with a good premise that it doesn't stick to, and as a result it also doesn't stick the landing. The skeleton of a good game is here, but there are just too many problems for me to recommend it. I'm frankly a bit baffled that it's as popular as it is.

The big marketing gimmick for this game, repeated constantly in the store page, is that it doesn't have a jump button. This is a lie. There is a jump button, it's just obfuscated behind the dash button, and consequently is very slow and tedious to use. So of course the game called Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom has a bunch of sections where you're stuck moving as slow as molasses, either because of the terrible slow boring jump or because of some other gimmick like a mandatory stealth level.

Your moveset is incredibly shallow, with only one button besides the movement controls. I'll admit that I didn't see the full game at the time of this review and I know for a fact there's at least one platforming-related thing I haven't unlocked yet (making the orange boxes solid), but I've been through 5 or 6 levels now, only the first one gave any abilities, half the buttons on my controller map to that ability, and I'm able to reach basically everything not orange-box-related with the abilities I've got, so I feel safe in assuming that there's nothing more to come.

The game could have gone much further than this - magic school bus transformations, mad max weapons, even just using your wind-up key to do wacky things like revving it up before having it spin your entire car to act as a drill, and that's just off the top of my head! Instead, because all you have is a dash and tank controls, all the game can really do is make you go pixel hunting for the right ramps to use and maybe put down a couple boost pads if it's feeling particularly daring. This is probably why the levels devolve into the gimmicks I mentioned before.

The world could have been charming - indeed, some of the jokes were kind of funny - but more often than not the same "joke" just gets repeated over and over, long after it's been run into the ground. Special mention to the lawyer "joke", where they have a lawyer give a "this game isn't based on anything IRL" disclaimer about 6 times per level. In a game where the main villain is "Alien Mosk" and his "Tosla" corporation. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spare me.

I did like the idea of the Crazy Taxi style levels where you need to actually be a taxi for a bit, even if the execution wasn't great; you basically have to do this a bunch right at the start of the level and then it's never a problem again, so it mostly ends up just being kind of a chore. It doesn't help that because the control scheme is so restricted, to even talk to any of these NPCs you have to come to a complete stop next to them for 1-2 seconds, and if you run them over on accident you have to wait even longer.

I threw in the towel at the Mosk "boss fight". You have to play pac-man, except in a 3D maze with absurdly tall walls that block your view of where any of the "ghosts" are, a full set of "ghosts" spawns every time you find Mosk even if all the previous ones are still alive, and it seems to be completely random whether a "power pellet" will even spawn, and if it does there's only one of them in the entire maze. The result is an exercise in frustration as you die over and over to "ghosts" you couldn't avoid because they either ambushed you from right around the corner or pincered you from both ends of a hallway. I actually did manage to beat this section once, except that I got caught by one of the mobs at the exact same time and was thrown back to the checkpoint without it counting for anything besides the achievement. That's the point I gave up on this game - it was neither fun, nor did it have anything to do with the premise anymore.

I 100%ed this game and now I wanna do it again

Needs more eurobeat!! But still great game

Charming, creative, oozing passion, and overflowing with style.

The movement is fluid and has a lot of mastery to it, it's collectathon that isn't grindy or slow, and nothing about it feels cheap or unfair (except you, Morio's Mind). Overall, this is a must-have if you're a fan of classic 3d platformers.

wish steam had a mixed review option (also sidenote the hour count isn't entirely accurate)

you can clearly see all the passion and love put into the game, the aethestics are amazing (love the skyboxes espcially), fantastic soundtrack, movement is fun, its a good game! i do recommend you go and play it if you are at all interested in it, ffs there's a free demo that transfers progress.

the main gripes for me personally are
1. the flip o will is just a jump but with extra steps, advertising it as a game without a jump button is kinda lame ngl and i do wish more of the platforming relied less on it
2. some of the humour didn't land with me, mainly the crass stuff and the "haha this dialogue box is a waste of time" type of stuff, again this is just a personal nitpick
3. the game leads more into the mario odyssey style of collectables, and i find that it can get a little old after a while, stuff like breaking the oil pumps and helping civilians travel from point a to point b, but there are a lot of levels with distinct visuals so

overall, i definitely think it does what it sets out to do well, its gonna be on most people's top 10 list of 2024, and congrats to the devs for making a cool ass game.

This is basically everything I love about video games cranked up to 12. Super fast pace, crazy satisfying tricks, a nearly non-stop sense of adrenaline, and a dumb fun sense of humor. It feels like the obvious end result of fusing 3D Mario-style platforming with Crazy Taxi, and I just couldn't get enough of it from start to finish.

That being said, I wasn't huge on the boss battles, they felt rather clunky. And the top down stealth sections were a little bit unintuitive... but aside from those minor grievances (which barely take up 30 minutes of the game may I add), this was DELIGHTFUL. Very much looking forward to whatever this team cooks up next! This was a crazy good debut title for the people at Panik Arcade.