Segregation by colour is a good thing (but only in Mini Motorways)

Mini Metro, Dinosaur Polo Club’s first strategy simulation game, revolved around building metro networks that move riders around a growing city as efficiently as possible. Mini Motorways is basically that same game, but with cars instead of trains (side note: :(). The result is something that feels familiar yet at the same time is clearly a very different game.

Reviewed version	macOS
Release date	20 July 2021
Developer	Dinosaur Polo Club
Publisher	Dinosaur Polo Club

Mini Motorways has almost all the ingredients it needs to qualify as a cosy game. Each game takes place on a slowly expanding map with a clean yet colourful aesthetic. And it’s all topped off with subtle background music that adapts to the pace of the game, creating a relaxing yet immersive experience.

Its gameplay also starts out quite cosy: every minute or so, a new destination appears on the map, followed by a few houses in a matching colour. You build a road that allows that destination to be reached from houses with the same colour. That’s basically the entire game in a nutshell.

However, a few minutes into the game Mini Motorways quickly loses much of that initial cosiness. As more cars hit the road, you’ll notice that traffic starts to become congested near busy intersections. At first, you can often work around this by segregating cars by colour as much as possible so that all cars driving on a particular road follow the same path and never need to stop for other traffic. Building roads requires tiles, but as you only have a limited number you’ll have to choose wisely where you put them.

As the game progresses, more houses and destinations pop up, often in inconvenient locations (side note: Kind of like acne…). For example, a green destination might spawn on a road that was supposed to only handle red traffic, or the destination and its matching houses spawn on opposite sides of the map. This often means that you’ll be forced to mix traffic from different colours.

Fortunately you have a number of traffic management tools at your disposal. Roundabouts and traffic lights help improve traffic flow so that cars don’t need to slow down or stop (as often) at intersections. Bridges allow you to build roads over water, while tunnels enable you to build roads through mountains. Finally, motorways are high-speed roads that can be built directly between two points on the map, bypassing other traffic and most geographic obstacles.

The catch is that these tools are scarce: you won’t be able to spam the map with roundabouts. If you’re lucky, you might get two of them – the rest have to be earned. At the end of each in-game week you might be given the opportunity to unlock more roundabouts (or another tool of your choosing), along with a number of additional road tiles.

The game is designed such that the demand for new trips increases every week. Eventually, demand will become so high that it exceeds the capacity of your road network. When that inevitably happens (side note: Resistance is futile.), destinations will start to “overflow”, similarly to how stations in Mini Metro overflow when too many passengers are kept waiting for too long. Both the city and your game come to a grinding halt.

Your goal is generally to facilitate as many trips as possible. Mini Motorways offers several modes. In normal mode, the road network can be dynamically refactored (side note: This must be done carefully, otherwise you might accidentally cause a gridlock.) to make it more resilient to gridlock. In expert mode, everything is permanent, which means you’ll have to think everything through first. If that’s not enough, each map also offers unique challenges that force you to come up with creative solutions.

Mini Motorways can be a fun game to play. Its low learning curve and (usually) short games make it very suitable for casual players who just want to solve some quick puzzles.

One thing I like less about Mini Motorways is that how long a game lasts often boils down to dumb luck. The locations where houses and destinations spawn (side note: As the screenshot below shows, there are ways to “nudge” the algorithm into (not) spawning them in specific places if you’re willing to put in the work.) and (I think) which tools you get to unlock at the end of each week are mostly random. I once had a city where I would suddenly achieve incredibly high scores after having repeatedly failed even the simplest challenges. I had already completed all Mini Metro and most of Mini Motorway’s achievements at that point, so I’m pretty sure it was not a skill issue…