Mini Motorways Reviews
The Apple Arcade classic comes to PC and is as glorious as ever.
Though it lacks content and features, Mini Motorways has consumed much of my gaming time since I downloaded it more than a week ago. The simple gameplay, clean interface, and satisfying difficulty ramp led me to say, “Just one more run,” several times a session before ultimately calling it quits. Mini Metro hooked me when it first came to iOS years ago and has remained one of my favorite games to enjoy in short bursts, and I’m glad to add Mini Motorways to that same gaming rotation.
Good puzzle games make you see the pathways in your mind before they show up in the game. Mini Motorways does this, and does it well. At its heart, Mini Motorways is about failure. Or your attempt to push failure back as long as possible, just like my parents' marriage. Eventually your city will collapse under its own pressure. But if you need a half hour to kill Mini Motorways is a great choice.
Despite its rather brief runtime, Mini Motorways shows what made the game so successful on mobile platforms. Featuring a gameplay loop that's hard to resist, the only thing holding it back is a lack of true variety. Luckily, when the gratification loop is this intoxicating and the price is so minimal, the limited replay value can be easily forgiven.
Mini Motorways is a short game, for sure, but it’s one of those games that you can get lost in for a little while as you rack your brain trying to figure out how to make all the traffic on-screen run smoothly as possible. Never in my life have I found joy in the thought of planning out roadways, but these mini-cities do bring a smile to my face.
There's no shortage of simulation titles on the market, but Mini Motorways truly shines in both visual aesthetics and skill ramp. But does this mobile port succeed in the move to PC, or is this a wrong turn that took the entire thing off course?
Mini Motorways is an enjoyable and often beautiful puzzler, but the lack of long term replayability makes it harder to recommend over its already excellent predecessor.
Mini Motorways is a puzzle game with a simple premise but one that I’ve grown quite addicted to. It doesn’t have a ton of content to play through but each time I attempted to build out the roads in one of these cities and failed, I was tempted to jump back in and try a different strategy. It’s the perfect type of game to just jump into when you have a few minutes here and there.
Experimentation with how best to use each element is fun and satisfying when something clicks. And when it doesn't, you simply pick that piece back up and try something else. It has been quite a while since a puzzle game so immediately conveyed its appeal to me and while there are certainly some small things I'd improve, it won't stop me from continuing to play this for a very long time.
The team at Dinosaur Polo Club clearly has a knack for creating stripped-down but beautiful graphics and for simplifying mechanics down to their essence, which is a clear strength for a title that aims for success on mobile devices. But in order to make Mini Motorways engaging on other platforms, they needed to introduce a new mechanic or a new way to tackle the traffic challenge to add to the depth of the experience.
Mini Motorways is the kind of deceptively simple puzzler that you'll somewhat dig at first but as you formulate new strategies and practice levels over and over again, you'll absolutely fall in love with what it has to offer, especially if you enjoy a good challenge.
Mini Motorways may seem like a simple game made for shorter sessions but the level of challenge and its growing complexity mean that it packs enough for many, many hours of entangled engagement with its gameplay mechanics. The audiovisual environment is minimalistic but suits the gameplay quite well while players find themselves more and more enraptured by the expanding cities they will have to connect in order to prevent chaos from spreading across the roads.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Whoever out there would say that simple games, or at least ones that at a glance could be "casual" are always trash has obviously never played the likes of Mini Motorways...
Featuring a decent number of cities and nice combinations of challenges, Mini Motorways is great when you are craving short bursts of puzzles as dynamic as the road traffic. This strategy simulation game is addicting and a half-an-hour session can easily stretch to a few hours as you attempt to “beat the traffic” and inch closer to yet another high score with “just one more try”. Its soundscape, like the vrooms and ticking of the changing traffic lights, is surprisingly relaxing and adds much intriguing flavor to the sleek minimalistic menu screens. While I do not feel particularly compelled to return to the game regularly for its daily or weekly challenges, my trips to the 14 cities were certainly fun while they lasted.
"What do you mean, how is urban planning difficult?"
Review in Finnish | Read full review
From the moment I started Mini Motorways on the Nintendo Switch, I had a nagging thought of familiarity in the back of my mind. A scratching déjà vu sensation like I had been here before. When I did some research, I quelled that feeling and realised I had played the developer Dinosaur Polo Club’s previous outing Mini Metro on my phone. They both feel similar and the mechanics are very much aligned. Phew, I am not going mad!
Mini Motorways is in many, well, ways, a terrific, truly addictive pick-up-and-play game for the Switch. Its fast-paced level structure and simplicity are incredibly well conceived and feel great to come back to time and time again. I’ve always been a big fan of management games in this style like Air Control, so having a spin like this to the formula is definitely up my wheelhouse and you’d be remiss not to at least give it a look.
With intuitive mechanics, a calming sound environment and an uncomplicated design, Mini Motorways is the perfect game to relax and at the same time work our gray matter. It's always rewarding to raise our high scores, while our losses are entirely attributable to our lapses in most cases. In the end, this is an addictive and cozy game that deserves the attention of all enthusiasts of the genre and will reward you for the time you invest in it.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
It's fun to see how Mini Motorways manages to mix a peaceful and rhythmic environment with a management puzzle that requires concentration and attention worthy of the best urban engineers.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
It could have been a really pretentious and mediocre art game, but Mini Motorways ended up being the complete opposite. This is pure arcade bliss, a simple but ridiculously challenging puzzler that won me over like few games in the genre. I can’t remember the last time I played a Switch game until its batteries ran completely dry because of how addictive and perfectly suited for portable play it was.