The sprites for gridlocked roads from SimCity SNES and SimCity 2000 are seared into my mind from the many hours they spent taunting me. I love city builders, but the intricacies of road design and avoiding traffic jams are always my least favorite part of titles like Cities Skylines. In reality they are very similar, but also different in a few precise and cleverly-calibrated ways that ultimately make Mini Motorways the far superior of the two. That game was built around railway infrastructure - but the freedom of the open road means that somehow the options you have on the table at any given moment gives this game’s action the impression of being less constrained than its predecessor. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very similar to a Dinosaur Polo Club title, Mini Metro. If things get too clogged up, it’s game over. Buildings are color coded - so blue homes will spit out cars of the same color that need to make their way to blue businesses - and therefore quickly the game’s randomly spawning infrastructure will force you to make hard decisions about moving around resources to keep the city moving. Your job is to carefully juggle the needs of the city with the resources you have, producing a layout that minimizes traffic jams.
You have a limited amount of roads and accessories such as roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, and of course motorways at any given time. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Buildings large and small crop up as time progresses, and your job is simply to connect everything up in a sensible manner that encourages further growth. You create a city, but this isn’t a typical city builder: all you have to do is craft the road system. Originally released via Apple Arcade and now available on PC, the concept of the game is blissfully, eighties-design era simple. With that said, every now and then a game pops up that I truly cannot lay any significant fault at - and one such release is Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Motorways. That's why I've chosen it as my personal pick.Does a perfect video game actually exist? I think there’s a strong argument for the idea that a truly perfect game - or any piece of art, for that matter - can never really happen.
#Mini motorways metacritic how to#
Now all I have to do is figure out how to apply my newfound skill set to big-boy city builder games, and I'm onto a winner.ĭespite being the weirdly educational game it is, Mini Motorways is the most thrilling traffic manager I've ever played. "Just one more 10 minute challenge," she says, three hours in, sporting a bloodshot gaze.įor me, Mini Motorways has turned into a safe (and fast-loading) Cities: Skylines practice arena, and my go-to lunch break pastime.
I also feel empowered to get up and start again when I fail-thanks to every playthrough ending abruptly, in utter bedlam, I always find myself raring to chip away at the problem again it's not like each game is very long anyway. I feel genuinely challenged in my ability to anticipate bottlenecks and plan ahead, and to use limited resources to solve really tricky spatial problems under pressure. It's like Mini Motorways is actually teaching me important life skills or something, which I was not expecting from a traffic sim. and that evil timer ticks ever-faster.Īs frantic and stressed as this game makes me, it also makes me feel accomplished. One wrong decision, and you either have to deal with intersections akin to that of the infamous Hanoi, or send your poor commuters on an hour-long diversion through the wilderness-sure, you can rip up the roads and re-lay them more efficiently, but they have to be clear first. Outsmarting it feels great, but slip up and your playthrough is entirely crippled. It's a game that truly tests you, requiring deep levels of planning, resourcefulness, and no small amount of clairvoyance. This game has honestly given me a profound respect for people who manage traffic flow for a living. for when you're inevitably losing sleep over the unfathomable routes it tasks you with unravelling. Your choice of a roundabout over a traffic light, bypass or bridge can be the difference between order and absolute mayhem. Without warning, it plonks a building somewhere utterly inaccessible, and now your perfectly considered routes need a rehash-but it all hangs on which feature you rolled the dice on during the last interlude. But as your city gradually grows from a sparse cluster of homes and businesses into a raging metropolis, prepare to have your brain muscles worked to their problem-solving limits.
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