Steam Next Fest is upon us and with it comes the celebratory discovery of games you might otherwise miss. Next Fest has been very much a modern-day revival of what we used to have in the days of the Xbox Live Arcade on 360 where you had big demo events for indie games and could try out as many games as your hard drive could hold. Now, we have a blend of bigger-name games in the fold too, but some games get front and center listings thanks to the genre separation that helps their exposure and one such game is Yellow Taxi Goes Boom, which has ademoavailable now. It’s an interesting blend of driving, platforming and collect-a-thon that blends a few different ingredients together to form an interesting stew.
The mechanic Morio has created a taxi that can go anywhere and help others and brings back a bit of the bump and jump car-platforming scene in arcades and NES games like, well, Bump ‘n Jump. The taxi controls accurately and isn’t floaty with its handling, which can take getting used to. It reminds me of Sonic Jam’s 3D World in how everything controls because movement is deliberate and you’re going to want to scope out areas to figure out the most effective paths. Some areas are horizontally-focused and require using the dash to get past – or using it to break blocks and get coins. Other times, you want to leverage that dash to have you hit something and send you upwards into more goodies.
The game uses a touch of tank controls with the triggers moving you backwards and forwards and it works nicely. You can easily reposition yourself with the left stick and then go into whatever direction you want with RT and then move backwards if you miss a coin or another collectable with LT. It’s all smooth and organic and works nicely with the overall flow of the action. Having a big hub area to explore and then having sub-areas to explore within that adds a sense that you’re in a single cohesive world and the use of a taxi and things like a PS1-era art style only with a far more stable framerate works nicely. The low-poly look is effective and the demo shows a lot of promise. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom as it nears a 2024 release date on Steam.
