As I stared at the disaster unfolding before my eyes, I kept thinking of one reassuring thought: I’m so glad I’m not a city planner. My spaghetti-looking network of roadways was a mess. The spaghetti was everywhere but under the sauce, you could say. My workers were tangled in traffic jams, my factories were about to close down due to the lack of workers, and I was about to bite through my lip because that’s what I do when I’m focused-stressed.
Thankfully, before any blood was shed, my entire city gave me the finger and abandoned me. The crisis was over. Mini Motorways had defeated me yet again.
I don’t think I’ll ever win this game. I don’t think anyone will. Mini Motorways is designed to eventually win every time. It’s a game that can’t lose.
But I keep coming back for more.
Mini Motorway’s lure, for me, is its presentation. Simple colors moving on lines I drew with my finger. It’s like watching colorful ants working around an anthill that you dragged a small stick through. You have the ability to loosely conduct the chaos for a short time before it all eventually becomes too chaotic to manage.
Before it ends in a congested traffic hell, Mini Motorways begins with one house and one factory. Plain and simple.
You drag your finger to connect the home to the factory. Connecting the two points forms a road. Soon thereafter a little car drives out of the house and to the factory, pausing for a moment in the factory’s parking lot to collect a work point and then the car turns around a goes home.
Sporadically, other houses pop up. If they’re the same color as the factory, you draw a line from the new house to the road that connects the first house to the factory to connect them. If they’re different colors you need to ensure that the cars from their houses can reach their associated, color-coordinated factory.
Rinse and repeat. A few minutes later you’ll find yourself managing a tangled network of roads, bridges, highways and traffic lights. The latter of which is pretty much useless. While the idea of a traffic light makes sense, their implementation in the game usually makes traffic networks worse. I almost always ended up with traffic jams wherever I installed traffic lights. Bridges and highways allow cars to pass over water and travel long distances at high speeds, respectively — clear, obvious benefits. Traffic lights…not so much.
Success is measured by how long you keep your city running. Factories fill up with work orders that need to be taken care of. If cars cannot get to the factories fast enough, the work orders pile up. If too many work orders pile up the game ends.
The catch to the whole game is that you can only work with a limited number of road tiles to satiate the ever-growing need of your city. Each week (a week in-game is only a few real-time minutes) you’ll be allotted a certain amount of road tiles and either a traffic light, a bridge or a highway to place. If you’re not careful and haphazardly make a long road, it’s possible that a house (or worse, a factory) spawns in the middle of nowhere and you have no road tiles left to connect it to an existing road.
Luckily, you can micromanage your road system with ease. Deleting road titles refunds those road tiles so you can test and tweak your roads as much as you desire.
The biggest frustration of Mini Metro is the fact that buildings spawn in randomly. While it’s part of the game, the fact that I can only attach a road to one specific corner of a factory’s parking lot means that if I have an established road network and a factory spawns way out in a field and the parking lot entrance is facing away from my city, I’m already at a major disadvantage for fulfilling that factory’s work orders, due to the distance cars will need to travel to get into the parking lot.
I’ve seen some players create small, disconnected stretches of road in fields to deter factories from spawning in those areas. While creative, I feel like the game should be a little more lenient with letting players attach roads to any tile a factory’s parking lot touches. Houses, strangely enough, are far less restrictive and will literally turn around to face a road if you drag a road to a house’s backdoor.
Mini Motorways is a fun, casual strategy game that I did enjoy, even though it utilizes some odd design decisions.
Mini Motorways was reviewed using an Apple Arcade subscription maintained by Epic Brew.
1 comment
Hi Tom. Do you still play this? I’m curious, as it seems you wrote this after only playing a few games so I’m wondering if you persisted with it. If you did, what are your thoughts on it now? I’ve just started exploring Apple Arcade’s games in the last few weeks and Mini Motorways is my favourite game I’ve found so far. I REALLY like it!