Soup up your tiny car so much you can launch it into space in this weird little open world driving game

A little creature in a car — (Image credit: snekflat)

Let me get this straight: I'm a goofy little dude speeding around a busy city, there's lots of traffic and pedestrians and ramps and bridges, my car is a literal taxi cab… and I'm not allowed to be a cab driver? I didn't quite understand that logic in driving adventure Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip—but I got over it pretty quickly, because there's still plenty to do in the cartoony and colorful open world.

Besides, you still get to do what cab driving games are best at: drive like a lunatic, smash into other cars, and send pedestrians flying like bowling pins.

What's sort of amusing is that the game itself seems to think you should be a cab driver, too, and it offers you the chance on multiple occasions. Terry needs a car so he can drive himself into outer space (more on this in a minute) so the first thing you do is apply for a job at a cab company.

But Terry's pretty clear he has no intention of doing the work of picking up fares and driving them around the city. He just wants the car, for reasons. Space reasons. Because this world is a very silly one, he gets the job.

Then he visits a garage where a mechanic offers to install a second seat in his car so he can pick up fares. Terry says no. He just flatly, bluntly, refuses to be a cab driver. He's only interested in one thing: driving fast enough to escape the planet's gravity. This will be accomplished by visiting the tower in the middle of the city, which is so tall you can't see the top and has been thoughtfully paved with asphalt so you can drive right up the side of it—if your car has enough power.

Terry's cab doesn't, so you have to search the city for scattered bits of "turbo junk" to give to the town mechanic so he can soup up those borrowed wheels, which means a lot of driving around in a little yellow car and hopping out regularly to explore neighborhoods, beaches, and shops.

Crime is perfectly acceptable in the city—I even meet a criminal who introduces himself by saying "I am a criminal"—and I'm free to essentially be a Grand Theft Auto protagonist, ramming people with my car, beating them with a pipe, smashing their vases and flowerpots Link-style, and helping myself to any money I find. But for all the vehicular and melee violence, it's all very silly and harmless, even when cars explode and citizens go flying.

When I'm not being a menace, there are lots of little quests and activities to do. I buy a bug-catching net to snap up floating blueprints which I can give to the pet store owner in exchange for adorable hamster-like critters that will follow me anywhere. That sentence is ridiculous, but so is much of Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip.

There are hats to buy, treasures to dig up, oddballs to talk to, and soccer games to play. My record is 3-0, because while I'm a failure as a cab driver and not much of an astronaut (yet), I'm excellent at footie, especially since I can hit my opponents with a lead pipe. Oops, I'm back to being a menace again.

The open world is a pretty small one: within an hour or so I'd found every location on the map and my goal of turbo-ing up my car is about 25% done. But there are still plenty of little quests I haven't completed, tons more junk and money to find, plenty of hats to purchase and hamsters to acquire. It feels like a great game for completionists, and I plan to be one of them. I only hope there's a sequel someday and I'll get to be Tiny Terry the Taxi Tycoon.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.