I love being involved in the game industry. I've been able to go to the coolest tradeshows, get some nice swag, meet great people, see games before many others, and I've played a ton of games since starting. Of course, every high has a low, and it doesn't get much lower than having to review Yaris for the Xbox 360. Who would've thought that something for free could cost someone so much?

Yaris is an advertisement game that promotes, what else, but the Yaris automobiles. I've seen the ads and actually thought the car kind of looked cool, and I liked the spider made out of gas pump nozzles that was used in their ads. However, I despise this "ad" and I now have nothing but hatred and disregard. Thanks to the developers I now no longer have any desire to own a Yaris…the exact opposite effect that the game should've had.

For starters, if you're trying to sell a car using an advertising game, would you not immediately make the game a racer? Well apparently that's too obvious and so the developers went of the box and made Yaris a futuristic sled racer/shooter. As soon as you fire the game up you'll automatically think that the game has some racing mechanics, and so you'll assume that the right trigger is your gas and your left trigger is for brake. Of course, imagine my surprise when the track started and the Yaris automatically goes on its own down the track – there are no brakes or gas…just go!

The goal of the game is to survive levels, which require you to use your Yaris to navigate left and right on half-tube tracks that go up and down steep slants and very sharp turns. Though you'll have to navigate a bit to avoid robots and road cones and collect coins, the main way in which you'll live (keeping your shields going) is by using your hood mounted weapon shooter. Your hood shooter has a default laser with infinite ammo, though you can pickup different poweups as you move along the tracks, such as a shotgun type laser and a weapon that shoots buzzsaws. So what will you be shooting while you slip and slide down these tracks? Well, you'll shoot little dots, slightly bigger dots, fat sumo wrestlers on pocketbikes, flaming circles, and toasters that run! Yes, I once discovered I had died because a running toaster with a trail of flames shooting out from behind it killed me.

The game has several different tracks, but the problem is that in the future apparently each track looks the exact same with the exact same grays and blues and the exact same type of half-tubes. There really isn't any navigating along the tracks, because besides only being able to determine if you slide up or down a tube, you're along for the ride for the most part as the game whips you around and around. So imagine you're zipping along at 130 MPHs, you're using the right thumbstick to look around and target enemies so they don't hit you, and while all of this is going on you're being rocked left and right, throwing off your aim and rushing blurred images in front of you so quick you feel queasy. You've probably heard of people who've got motion sickness playing a FPS, but this was the first game I've ever personally started to feel sick while playing, watching the images go by me.

Despite the sloppy gameplay, there is nothing next-gen or even remotely pretty about Yaris. The cars look like single, shimmering sheets of metal rapped around a frame; weapons look like nothing more than one color blobs or straight white lines; the levels and environmental backgrounds have the same sheen with little substance much like the cars; and the enemies are just as dull and uninspired (honestly, running toasters and circles).

We've yet to really love an advertising game that's been put out there, but we've respected the efforts of some, most notably the Burger King games (minus Sneak King). The big difference between the Burger King games and Yaris is the fact that the Burger King games had a bit of polish technically to them, but most importantly they were fun. Yaris is not fun…not fun at all. Even at the ripe price of free, don't spend the time downloading the game, the disc space that is required to own the game, and think of the humiliation that will come from someone comparing their games to yours only to see you've played Yaris.

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