Mini Motorways
A game where it's always Infrastructure Week.
Mini Motorways was one of the 2019 launch titles on Apple Arcade. It’s Dinosaur Polo Club's sophomore title, an amazing sequel to the sublime Mini Metro (which has now also found a home on Apple Arcade). Both games are about building transit systems, both are about drawing connections between different hubs in order to shuttle people from one place to the next, and both can be played in about 5-10 minutes. Where Mini Metro focused on subway lines, Mini Motorways is all about cars and roads. There aren’t levels or progressions, just different world cities you can unlock to play between. Progress comes in the form of trying to one-up a previous high score or ranking on a daily challenge.
What is it about?
The game has two actions to repeat. You are either creating roads, placing a traffic item (like a roundabout, freeway, or stoplight), or moving/removing something. Your goal as a player also stays the same, connect houses and buildings of the same color so that cars can travel the path between them. These actions stay the same as the game progresses: but the complexity increases drastically. When you start it's easy to draw a straight path between a house and a building. A few minutes in (weeks in-game time) it becomes impossible to draw a road without considering other connections between unrelated houses and buildings.
The end, like Motorways’ predecessor Mini Metro, arrives when a building has too many waiting passengers and overflows, dragging the city to a halt. The fact that there aren’t many different concepts to think about, and that the city grows at a consistent pace, means you’re unlikely to ever find yourself completely in over your head. The game starts with a connection between one house and one building and escalates from there. While the end result may be shocking (I’ve discovered that the perfectly placed stoplight ended up creating a traffic jam 30 cars long), I always felt responsible for the outcome.
Mini Motorway's success lies in how it leaves a near-perfect visual representation of the choices of expediency you make early in the game become chokepoints to success later in the game. It shows how individual decisions to solve direct problems can create systemic issues down the line when that cross-street you created to allow easy access to your buildings becomes a major thoroughfare that cars have to pull out of their driveways to get on. But now you're in too deep and you can't change fast enough to prevent catastrophe.
There are also a variety of cities with different types of terrain that you can choose between, each offering different challenges and opportunities.
Where does it fit?
Mini Motorways feels like a continuation of a recent trend in games where you spend most of your time watching the system operate instead of moving the game forward with your actions. Unlike other city-building games, your job isn't to build a city, it's to ensure the city continues operating, allowing the city to grow on its own. It reminds me of tower-defense games like the Kingdom Rush series, or even more recent titles like Loop Hero. Games like these reduce stress by allowing you to spend a good chunk of time just watching the game, but can also increase stress towards the end because you can find yourself frantically trying to make changes to keep the game going as the traffic problems spin inexorably out of control.
The game does a great job of abstracting a lot of the complexity of the decisions you make out of your view. New houses and buildings pop up at semi-regular intervals. It happens fast enough to feel pressured but not so fast that you feel like the game is controlling your success or failure. It also hides a lot of the decision-making about what paths cars take, and how you can destroy and rebuild roads instantaneously. For example, when you erase a road that still has cars, the UI shows you that the road is still "in-use" and then does the calculations for cars to make use of the road while directing newer cars to the new road. Eventually, the original road disappears and only the new configuration remains. This abstraction hides a lot of complexity to allow you to make decisions without worrying about the how of the outcome. You can rearrange the world as you see fit and the game will figure out how to make that happen.
Does it belong on Apple Arcade?
The game is well suited to being on a mobile device because it doesn’t need to create a lot of UI or options for the player to select between. There are two modes “View” where the player can see what’s going on, or “Edit” where the player can zoom in and either add or remove roads. Clicking into the "Edit" mode zooms you into the spot on the screen you want to look at, which makes modifying the city easy even on a phone. Playing the game on an iPad got a bit cumbersome. Trying to click around a larger screen involved setting the device down to perform the necessary operations.
Mini Motorways also feels like it shares a similar design language as other parts of iOS. The interaction is springy and feels consistent with other default applications. The camera zooms in and out at an accelerating and decelerating pace when you go to make a change (rather than a consistent zoom), and the roads pop in and out of existence. There are gentle curves everywhere, reinforcing the concept of safety and making it feel like it’s ok to mess up: there won’t be any accidents in this city. The sounds also match the visual elements giving it a playful feel, kind of like the giant wooden and colored blocks kids play with. It’s the type of polish that gives the game a lot of juice, making individual moments feel as special as the story of the whole system. If a simulation or city-planning type game is something you might enjoy, I’d recommend taking a closer look.
Where To Find Mini Motorways
It launched on Apple Arcade in 2019, but has since come out on Steam and is making its way to Nintendo Switch sometime in 2022.
What did you think?
I’d love to hear what you think about the theme and the article. Is there anything you’d like to see done differently? Anything I could’ve highlighted?
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