Making these risk and reward decisions is all part of the fun, but where Metro's puzzle pieces focused on making things more efficient (giving you tunnels, extra subway lines, carriages and interchanges to play with), Motorways shifts its puzzling element onto the city's topography. Whereas Metro's puzzle pieces focused on making its mode of transport more efficient, Motorways shifts its puzzling element onto the city's topography. Each week's options are randomised, so one week you could be choosing between a straight 30 road tiles or 20 road tiles with a roundabout (the latter of which can help ease the flow of traffic at big junctions), while another might give you 20 road tiles along with the choice of a traffic light, tunnel, or a bridge. In another nod to the first game, getting to the end of the week earns you more tools to play with, giving you a choice of what to bring with you into the week ahead. Of course, the thrill of Mini Motorways (much like Metro before it) is in redesigning your road network on the fly, drawing new roads with a click and drag of your mouse in real time - although you can always hit pause and take a more considered approach if you want to. However, Zurich quickly starts introducing bridges and tunnels as the map expands. At first, Mini Motorways is always delightfully simple. I have a better sense of what to do next time, which is something I never really got at the end of a Metro run. It's at this point where my cities usually collapse, but simply being able to see those conflicting colours fight against the tide of their new neighbourhood already makes the map and its pressure points much easier to parse than the jumble of microscopic shapes getting antsy in Mini Metro. You might get lots of red houses congregating together in one part of the map, for example, while a bunch of blue and yellow developments appear in opposite corners, making it easier to funnel certain colours in a specific direction.Įventually, though, rogue houses start cropping up all over the place, signalling the next step in your road-building puzzle empire. To begin with, these houses tend to crop up in rough, colour-coded zones. As time goes on, your top-down view gradually expands, allowing more houses to crop up on the map, as well as more shopping centres for them to drive to. It's not the most environmentally friendly picture in the world (we can always pretend they're electric cars, can't we?), but having your citizens on the road like this does create a much busier and more authentic picture of your city's overall progress than the abstract shapes queuing up at its predecessor's metro stations.Ĭrucially, that busyness doesn't come at the cost of clarity, especially when things start to go wrong. The more pins you collect, the higher your overall score at the end. These colour-coded depots gradually fill up with little pins, at which point a car of the corresponding colour will pull out of their drive and go and collect it, like an ant's nest of frantic Deliveroo drivers. Whereas before you were joining up subway stations to get people to their intended destination, Motorways sees you building roads between houses and increasingly busy shopping centres. Like its subterranean predecessor, Mini Motorways starts small, the camera focused tightly on just a small cluster of map tiles. But by golly is it fun.Įven with the action taking place above ground this time, the general rhythm of Mini Motorways will feel instantly familiar to previous Metro heads. The pins stack up, jams back up for miles, and gridlock eventually brings the whole city to a crashing halt. Just when I think I've got a handle on ferrying each city's busy commuters between their homes and giant industrial centres, something inevitably goes wrong. If the brilliant Mini Metro gave me a newfound admiration for city subway designers, then Dinosaur Polo Club's latest minimalist transport sim Mini Motorways proves that urban road planners are actual god tier human beings.Įven with some of today's most iconic conurbations such as LA, Tokyo and Dubai reduced to their neatest, simplest geographical lines and land masses, I still manage to make a pig's ear of laying down a functioning road network.
Building on the excellent Mini Metro that came before it, Mini Motorways is a great evolution of Dinosaur Polo Club's minimalist transport sim.
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