It is said that even the best of plans often go awry, and Mini Motorways makes that clear. What starts out as a pleasant city planning simulation evolves into a frenetic puzzle that you must solve before time runs out. The stress of having your carefully planned urban infrastructure collapse before your eyes is undeniable. However, it is in this often sudden transition from meditative to manic that Mini Motorways shines, offering players a unique take on both the puzzle and city planning simulation genres.
It all starts with choosing a real city to build in. Whether you want to grapple with Los Angeles’ LA River and Santa Monica Bay, or the mountains surrounding Mexico City, each map offers unique problems to solve. My favorite area, Wellington, combines countless elements like a bay, harbor and mountains to test your resource management.
At its core, Mini Motorways is all about connecting randomly spawned houses and targets that appear one by one as your run progresses. the house colors correspond to the destinations that the vehicles have to reach. You are given a set number of road tiles to place, which means you have to be efficient to ensure the roads you need are possible. Some of my favorite moments of scratching my head came when I redraw the map on the fly, realizing my current plan wasn’t going to work; Luckily, you can pause the action to plan if things get too overwhelming. Each week in game you choose additional resources and tools to add to your inventory. You’ll get more and more road tiles for the coming week, but Mini Motorways also gives you a choice of objects like roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, tunnels, and highways that will help you clear traffic jams and reach new buildings.
Since each week takes about two and a half minutes at normal speed (although I usually keep my speed at fast), new resources arrive in your inventory at a rapid pace. That’s a good thing, too, because even the best runs are only one poorly planned crossing away from failure. I loved adding a traffic light to a busy intersection to improve flow, while a perfectly placed cross-town freeway made the difference between an immediate outage and adding a few weeks to my drive. Roundabouts are perhaps the most effective tool for preventing end-of-game traffic jams, but placement restrictions are sometimes frustrating due to their space requirements.
The goal of Mini Motorways is to keep your city operational even as the map slowly zooms out, giving you more real-world topography to contend with. Each run starts out nice and slow, but as the map expands and your town grows, so does the cadence at which houses and objectives appear on the map. Despite being designed for a touchscreen or mouse, using a Switch Pro Controller is a surprisingly precise way to move the cursor (especially since the control options are so customizable). However, in moments of panic, the control scheme caused a few bugs. If you don’t like controlling the cursor with the joystick, you can draw your streets on the touchscreen in handheld mode.
I love how each building on the map requires equal attention as the playable area grows; If even one target falls behind and people are stranded for too long, it’s game over. While the quiet, light moments are satisfying in their own way, I love it when the action and difficulty escalate and I need to efficiently tackle the problems that arise quickly. With so much on-screen at this point in the run, it’s easy to lose track of new objectives or houses appearing, but the minimalist UI and art style work well for keeping track of the status of all your buildings.
While I appreciate the real world map systems that Mini Motorways uses, it offers less than half the maps of its predecessor, the Mini Metro. Mini Motorways complements these 14 maps with daily and weekly challenges that take the mainline scenarios and add various modifiers (like bridges that cost twice as much as road tiles, or start your run with maxed-out motorways in your inventory). However, these don’t add much to the overall content of the game, especially when the rest of the feature set is similar to barebones.
While lacking in content and features, Mini Motorways has taken up a majority of my gaming time since I downloaded it more than a week ago. The simple gameplay, clean interface, and satisfying difficulty ramp made me say “just one more run” multiple times per session before eventually quitting. 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 happy to add Mini Motorways to the same game rotation.
