Yaris is not a racing game. Yaris is a tube-shooter. Yeah, I'm scratching my head over that one too.
Yaris is the advergame based on the Toyota-brand Yaris compact car. In it, you pilot a Yaris as it drives through gravity-defying (not as cool as it sounds) tubes in a 3-lap circuit, blasting MP3 players, gas-passing sumos, flaming sawblades, and floating spiders made of gas pump handles with a laser tentacle that emerges from the hood of your car. The concept is just as weird as it sounds.
The controls for the game are just as weird. You use the left stick to accelerate, decelerate, and to shift from side to side through the tubes that you race through. You use the right analog stick to aim your firing reticule at the enemies that try to get in your way, and you press the right trigger to fire at them, while selecting your weapons with the left and right bumpers. And in multiplayer games, you have 'auras' mapped to your face buttons which affect you and your competition when you activate them. Oddly enough, only one of the auras actually affects your opponent negatively. The rest benefit you both, which is odd, because it's competitive multiplayer.
Each course is a tube of varying length that loops into itself, and the object of the game is to complete 3 circuits in it while not getting blown up by the surreal enemies that swarm you as you tear down the completely boring and identically-skinned tubes. The general gameplay resembles Tempest in a way, though the action is much more frenetic and you're blasting enemies that usually are floating in the air, causing you to wave your reticule around the screen nigh aimlessly. The enemies are very strange, and other than the gasoline spiders, I can't figure out what the symbolism is in most of them. I just know it's supposed to be there.
I've spent all this time trying to explain the game, when it's really not deserving of an explanation that deep, because the game is too schizophrenic and frantic, and even broken to be worth your time. Sure, you get weapons to blow stuff up with, and yeah, you can collect coins to improve your car's appearance, weapon capacity, and shield strength, but when you're going so fast you can't see what's up ahead clearly, or when you try to shoot high enemies, but the camera pulls away from where you're driving, usually causing you to plow through several hazards trying to shoot a single enemy with weapons so uninteresting that even the rocket launcher is completely yawn-inducing and even silent, there's no point in wasting breath. It's not that it's a game based on an advertisement...it's that there's no game behind it.
It may be free, but free is no excuse to settle for a bad game. Unless you're really hard up for a new game, avoid it.
...No. On second thought, just avoid it.