Underneath the terrible gameplay and lackluster controls, a good idea or two is hiding.
The old adage "no such thing as bad press" is proven wrong, as the horrific controls of this game make it a nearly-unplayable mess, and make me want to not buy a Toyota Yaris, especially if giant green sumos on mini-bikes are going to wave their arms at me as iPods with angel wings fire concentric blue rings at me.
And that's the problem with Yaris: There's certainly a fantastic game there, hiding underneath. But it isn't underneath shameless and blatant product plugging; for all its maligned "adverware" titling, the Toyota tie-in is the least of this game's problems.
Set in a gray, featureless tube you must roll down, shooting at enemies with your gun that is held by a freakish tendril affixed to the roof of your car. And the enemies are creative, varied and esoteric (the aformentioned sumos-on-minibikes, angel iPods, spiders made of gas station hoses), but ultimately with the aim-assisted tendril-cannon, you end up just racing in a straight line, holding down fire.
There's certainly a market for a trippy futuristic halfpipe racer on XBox Live, along the lines of WipeOut, and Yaris is deeply disappointing just because it could have been that game, but it lacks the sense of speed that future racers are known for, and the muddy, unresponsive controls detract further from that sense of movement. And if I thought I could *zoom* down alien corridors in my Yaris, maybe when I was looking for new cars, I might swing by the Toyota dealership, which would be the ultimate goal of the game, anyway.
In the end, Yaris is a great concept, but with *deeply* flawed execution. I cannot stress enough how un-fun the game is to play, and it isn't because of the adverware roots of the gmae; the gameplay is bad and slow, with no sense of actually "racing" so much as just barely rolling. It's a shame because the relative failure of Yaris will probably steer other companies away from releasing Adverware, which is a net loss for gamers, most of whom are (hopefully) too savvy to be swayed by viral marketing such as this, but would certainly play and enjoy a good game that was free and plastered with ads.