Mini Motorways Review

Who could have thought a minimalist game about road building could be quite so charming and challenging at the same time? As Mini Motorways tasks you with creating road layouts for some of the world’s busiest cities, that’s exactly what you’ll find. Can you handle the traffic flow for the environments themed after Los Angeles, Tokyo, or Rio de Janeiro? That is your challenge. The maps are minimalist interpretations, incorporating some natural landmarks from each city, but other than that, how you lay out the roads is up to you.

Well, the last part is only partly true. Mini Motorways is a puzzle game at heart with the aim to create the best flow of traffic possible, but it determines the source and destination of the traffic and it’s up to you to meet its demands. Destinations and vehicles are colour coded, so red cars need to be able to get to red buildings, blue cars to blue buildings, and so on. Levels start off simply with one colour to focus on, but as time ticks by more colours will appear along with more destinations.

As these appear things get more complicated. For example a blue building may appear on one side of the ever growing map, but the blue houses from which cars originate may be all the way of the other side. There are time limits in play for every car journey, so if cars fail to get to the destination in time, the demand for traffic to a building exceeding your ability to supply, then the level ends. It means making sure roads do not clog up with traffic, or having to build a motorway to act as a shortcut.

Depending on the level, you’re given different items to help manage the traffic management. These include bridges, tunnels, roundabouts, traffic lights and motorways. Your supply of these is limited (as is the number of road tiles you can place) but you can make changes to road layouts on the fly. If a route is not working out as hoped you can delete it and create a new one.

At the end of each game week you will be offered a choice to pick a bonus. These bonuses could be a bumper offer of road tiles, or a mix of road tiles along with a traffic management aid. These decisions have to be weighed carefully. For example, one of the locations may have lots of water which can only be traversed by using a bridge. Do you take the risk of not picking the bridge and come to regret it later? Or will not having enough road tiles to connect homes and destinations to the network hurt you more?

Things can get chaotic quickly in Mini Motorways. What works early in a level can easily cause an issue later on. For example, in one of my levels I had a four junction roundabout. Early on it worked wonders with no cars getting stuck, but then a building appeared next to it adding a fifth junction, and suddenly vehicles were backing up. In these situations you have to look at the whole network you have laid out and see if you can improve it somewhere along the route. You can pause time in the game allowing you to think about the current layouts and tinker with it.

When a run eventually comes to an end, it’s because you’ve reached a certain tipping point that your network couldn’t handle. If you hit the right milestones you will unlock more maps and challenges, while each map lets you see how you fared when compared to other players. There are also weekly and daily challenges that add modifiers to maps that you can attempt. The only potential downside is that there’s no way to create a truly sustainable network. There’s always a ratcheting up of difficulty as new buildings pop up, and every attempt will inevitably crumble into failure.

The visual design of Mini Motorways is pleasingly minimalist. The hues of colours make each city stand out as unique a bit more. The yellows of Los Angeles feel very different to the light blue and pink hues of Tokyo. The sound design is well done too. When things are smooth the traffic can be heard to flow nicely, but as soon as jam appears cars will honk, alerting you to the situation, complimenting the background music very well.