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. The pins stack up, jams back up for miles, and gridlock eventually brings the whole city to a crashing halt. 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. Like its subterranean predecessor, Mini Motorways starts small, the camera focused tightly on just a small cluster of map tiles. 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. 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. The more pins you collect, the higher your overall score at the end. 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. 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. To begin with, these houses tend to crop up in rough, colour-coded zones. 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. 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. 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. At first, Mini Motorways is always delightfully simple.
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