REVIEW : Mini Motorways (PC)
Following up on the superb logic building game Mini Metro with a similar project and attempting to surpass it may appear nearly ridiculous. However, the Dinosaur Polo Club developers were not deterred; they went back to the drawing board and eventually came up with a free sequel to Mini Motorways, in which underground trains are replaced by cars driving instead of tunnels through the meandering streets of future cities.
Yes, it may appear ridiculous. It appeared to me as well. But that’s entirely incorrect because the authors did it. They raised the standard and created a minimalist masterpiece, which I shall describe in the following paragraphs.
The concept has remained mostly unchanged. Suddenly, two buildings appear on a grassy field, each of which wants something in turn. However, unlike Mini Metro, where you had to convey passengers from one station to another using simple patterns, Mini Motorways is played entirely in colour.
The game won’t tell you, but you’re emotionally observing a perverted organisation that is just interested in buying. As soon as a new building arises, it immediately begins to spin some wheel, which you must avoid at all costs. Otherwise, the warehouses will get congested, and the city as a whole would collapse in this twisted reality.
It’s a shaky cohabitation that works for a time. You will first notice a white mall, followed by a white house with a garage concealing two cars.
All you have to do is connect the house and the mall by an arbitrarily twisted connection. As soon as the first things materialise, one automobile takes off instantly and automatically. This is the start of his fate. He will go back and forth like mad until the end of the city, fulfilling the most crucial mission – delaying your loss.
Mini Motorways is not a game that you can complete or win. You’re always going to lose. It’s only a matter of time before it happens. Each purchase equals one point toward your overall score, which is the only thing that is expressly played in this game. You beat yourself, compete with other players in online leaderboards, and participate in daily and weekly challenges.
Mini Motorways are a twist on Indian mandalas because your city must come to an end once and for all. You know from the start that you will make something great, breathtaking, and extremely intricate, which you will have to demolish after all of your hard work. And you’ll be glad about it. It’s just that, and it has the potential to provide calm to the soul.
Playing this game is a Zen experience that, in addition to the concept mentioned above, is complemented by the gameplay and audiovisual processing. The colour contrasts in various palettes, the intricate roads and their bends, roundabouts, bridges, tunnels, and, of course, the title highways combine to make a colourful image that is a joy to look at at all times of his life.
Drawing numerically limited roads on the fly or during a paused game is never stressful because you can erase the entire infrastructure in two or three seconds and create a whole new, more functional mess of streets that will bring you even more portion of the joy of your great idea for a new bypass.
You appreciate it as long as you can maintain the distinct colour segments separate, such as when the blues drive uninterrupted into the blue mall. At the same time, the reds circle them without the chance of merging or the presence of an intersection where crowds could build. However, an algorithm that generates random malls and houses, the presence of which you must accept and cope with, would eventually produce a situation in which you can’t avoid combining colours. The greens and violets are forced to share the same way; they slow each other down, they arrive late at the mall, the warehouses are filled, and the hustle and bustle begin.
In such cases, the previously stated unique segments, such as roundabouts and motorways, will come in handy. Still, you only get them once a week, in addition to two randomly picked ones, of which you can keep just one along with another batch of roads. But, of course, you can never have enough of anything, so you keep planning new routes and better intersections to ensure that everyone arrives on time for their desired things.
And, much as in the Mini Metro, you’re always drifting away imperceptibly. While you are so close to the beginning of the construction of the new city that just a few structures cover the full screen, by the end of your journey, you see the complete city with dozens of shops, many more houses, and twice as many automobiles on the roads.
Zooming out on a static camera is so sluggish that you usually don’t notice it at all, and if you do, you’ll be startled by the path you’ve travelled at the time. This adds to the Zen-like ambience. Mini Motorways will lose a lot of its enchantment if the authors offer you control over the camera’s movement and zoom. They didn’t, thankfully.
They have only given you a few jobs to complete, which you may perform using the left (drawing roads) and right (deleting roads) mouse buttons. Nonetheless, it is a very sophisticated building method that will sometimes irritate your brain but will gently reward you with a better-resolved traffic scenario and never disturb your peace.
It’s a wonderful, minimalist game that’s bigger, more complicated, nicer, and more specific than Mini Metro, which was too abstract. So far, I’ve been glad to return to the Mini Metro, but now I’m not sure why. In short, Mini Motorways has evolved well beyond the shadow cast by its already superb predecessor.
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