A shameless marketing scam, Yaris is such a bad game that any self-respecting developer should be ashamed of it
The only reason I say "almost" is because Yaris gave me two things. One, a chance to bask in its complete and utter awfulness, and two, the chance to finally review a terrible game.
So, sit back, relax, and try not to vomit when you look at the screen shots. Here is my review of Yaris.
Let's set the record straight right away. Yaris is by no means good. It is not average, either. It's not even disappointing or bad. Yaris is awful. It has terrible graphics, gameplay, and sound. As if that weren't enough, it's hard, too. It might be interesting for the first race or so, but there is absolutely no reason to play it more once your original curiosity is slated.
Yaris has no story. You will control a 2007 Toyota Yaris with a laser - yes, a laser - protruding from its hood. You will race around a course avoiding obstacles, hitting boosts, and collecting coins, all the while fending off weird monsters like mechanical spiders and roller-blading toasters.
An interesting premise, no? Perhaps, but the execution is absolutely horrendous. The controls suck, the car handles like a brick, and there is so much going on that the game is too hard. Sometimes, you'll have two enemies ahead of you leaving long lines of fire that kill you almost instantaneously while three squads fly in the air above you and shoot clouds of poisonous gas. All the while, large blue bumps and cones lie randomly in the road, and you're traveling 180 mph.
It would seem, then, that it's a good thing that your weapons are so overpowered. You'll start out with your average laser, a gun that can take out the weaker enemies in one hit, but with no splash damage. However, as you gain weapon upgrades by downing enemies and collecting powerups, you'll see a distinct pattern- each upgrade does more damage and has more splash. Once you get the third or fourth upgrades, you'll be able to take out entire squads in one shot.
Also making the shooting easier is the auto-lock. It's so lenient that you can kill enemies by pointing vaguely in their direction and holding down the trigger. The auto-lock is sometimes rendered useless by the hit-detection, though, which is so bad that it seems completely random whether you're hitting an enemy or missing. Sometimes, you'll have your targeting reticule right on top of an enemy, and be firing relentlessly without hitting them. Other times, you'll be shooting and hitting enemies without knowing it.
A terrible control scheme plagues the game too. Driving is assigned to the left stick, as are acceleration and deceleration. So you'll often be accelerating while just trying to turn. You'll move your targeting reticule with the right stick and fire with the left trigger. Trying to control all three of these actions is frustrating. The camera doesn't make things any better. It seems to flip around randomly with no way to control it, and your car can disappear from the screen entirely when you fly up hills or along the wall. This is not a good thing when all the aforementioned enemies and hazards still plague you mercilessly.
Your car can't take all that much damage either, and even being hit once or twice by the tougher enemies takes down a great portion of your health. You can upgrade your car, and the upgrades help, but only slightly. To make matters worse, they cost so much that you have to grind on the easier tracks several times to have enough coins to purchase even the minimally helpful ones. And simply to complicate things even more, there are no checkpoints during the races. That's right, you can be racing along the track, seconds from the finish line after three previous laps, only to die and have to restart all over again.
I don't believe that Yaris was intended to be an overtly difficult game, but too many things happen at once and it's too hard to control your car. The difficulty isn't challenging either – when a game is challenging it's a good thing - it's just frustrating.
One thing that Yaris does have going for it is the framerate; it's rock solid even with a lot of enemies flying around on screen, and this is fortunate, because a jagged framerate would have broken the game completely.
Graphically, Yaris is very unimpressive. The actual tracks that you will race on are bland and uninspired. The tracks simply consist of varying shades of blue and gray, and are almost entirely cell-shaded. Each track consists of twists, turns and drops; they all feel unique, but look the same. Another problem is that the boost icons on the tracks look very similar to some of the obstacles. Countless times I was thinking I was going to get a boost, only to smash into an obstacle and lose some of my health.
The other objects in Yaris look bad, too. Your car is an indistinct red blob with black details, and the enemies are just botches of colour. The only ones that you can actually tell what they are are the larger ones, like the sumo wrestlers or the toasters.
The actual enemy designs in Yaris are either creative or stupid, depending on how you look at it. They range from motorcycle riding sumo wrestlers to roller-blading toasters that create trails of fire. There are also two bosses. Yes, there are boss fights in Yaris. The first one occurs in level four, and it's a giant mechanical spider. The other one is the final boss, and it's a Transformers rip-off. That being said, the boss fights are perhaps one of the games only redeeming qualities. They're as frantic and fast-paced as the rest of the game, and perhaps a miniscule bit more fun.
Yaris obviously has no voice-acting, and the music is an annoying techno beat that is kind of neat the first time you hear it, but switches over to annoying after the twentieth rendition. I mean, would it have killed Backbone to at least include more than two or three songs? It would have made the game slightly more playable, if the beat deviated every few minutes.
All taken into account, Yaris is still free, right? In a purely monetary sense, yes. However, you have to take in to account the time it takes to download and play it, and the hard-drive space it takes up. In the two minutes or so it takes to download Yaris, you could eat a cookie, or take out the trash. And that hard-drive space could be taken up by a good title, like Ikaruga or N+. So Yaris is not completely free.
The game does have multiplayer, and it's kind of interesting. You and an opponent will race along a track. It doesn't matter who gets to the end first, however. It's about whoever racks up the most points by shooting enemies and collecting coins. The multiplayer is interesting, but almost entirely deserted by now, and it doesn't single-handedly compensate for all of Yaris's other faults.
In the end, I really can't recommend Yaris. It's a shameless marketing scam, and not a very good one at that. If you think about it, it's entirely false (since when do Yaris's come with lasers attached to their engines?). At the very most, the game is playable, but not passable. It's not completely broken, but terrible in all departments that matter.
If you are very bored or broke (preferably both), consider downloading Yaris, I guess. It only takes a minute, and it's worth it just for the first level, when you're slightly curious. Plus, there's something interestingly satisfying about blowing fat sumo wrestlers off of motorcycles with a Gauss Cannon. But after that, in the name of all things holy, take out the trash. Delete Yaris from your hard-drive. Or better yet, skip it entirely and download Ikaruga.