Mini Motorways – -apkrig
It may seem almost foolish to try to build on the excellent logic building game Mini Metro with a very similar project and want to overcome it. However, the developers from the Dinosaur Polo Club were not afraid of that, they returned to the drawing boards and finally came up with a free sequel to Mini Motorways, where underground trains are replaced by cars driving instead of tunnels through the winding streets of future cities.
Yes, it may seem silly. It seemed to me too. But completely wrong, because the authors really did it. They raised their own bar and created a minimalist masterpiece, which I will introduce to you in the following lines.
The concept remains more or less unchanged. Suddenly, two buildings grow on a green field, one of which wants something one by one. But while in the Mini Metro you had to transport passengers from one station to another using simple patterns, in Mini Motorways the game is played purely on colors.
The game doesn’t tell you directly, but you are emotionally watching a perverted company that is interested in nothing but shopping. As soon as a new building appears, it immediately starts to create some kind of wheels, which you have to get out of it at all costs. Otherwise, the warehouses will be overcrowded and the whole city will collapse in this perverted reality.
It’s a very flimsy cohabitation that works great for a while. First you will see a white mall and soon a white house with a garage hiding two cars. All you have to do is connect the house with the mall on an arbitrarily twisted path, and as soon as the first goods appear, one car immediately and automatically sets off. This is the beginning of his destiny. Until the end of the whole city, he will go back and forth like crazy and fulfill the most important task – to delay your loss.
Mini Motorways is not a game you can finish or win. You always lose. It’s just a matter of when that happens. Each individual purchase taken represents one point of your score, which is the only thing that is explicitly played here. You trump yourself, compete with other players in online leaderboards and daily and weekly challenges.
The fact that your city must end once and for all makes Mini Motorways a variation on Indian mandalas. From the beginning, you know that you will create something amazing, breathtaking and very complex, which you will have to tear down after all that effort. And you will be happy about it. It’s just about that and it’s something that can bring peace to the soul.
Playing this game is a Zen experience, which, in addition to the idea described above, is also supported by the gameplay itself and audiovisual processing. The color contrasts in several different palettes, together with the intricate paths and their curves, roundabouts, bridges, tunnels and, of course, the title highways, together form a colorful picture that is a joy to look at in every single moment of his life.
Gracefully drawing numerically limited roads and coming up with an ideal solution to a complicated traffic situation on the go or during a paused game is never stressful due to the fact that you can erase the entire infrastructure in two or three seconds and create a whole new, more functional mess of streets that will bring you even more portion the joy of your own great idea for a new bypass.
You enjoy it as long as you manage to keep the individual color segments separate, ie when the blues drive undisturbed into the blue mall, while the reds circle around them without the possibility of any blending, without the existence of an intersection where crowds could form. But sooner or later, an algorithm that creates random malls and houses, the presence of which you simply have to accept and deal with, will create a situation where you can’t avoid blending colors. The greens and the violets suddenly have to share the same path, they slow down each other, they arrive in the mall with a delay, so the warehouses are filled and the hustle and bustle begins.
With such situations, the mentioned special segments, such as roundabouts and motorways, will help you, but you only get them once a week, in addition to two randomly selected ones, of which you can keep only one together with another batch of roads. You never have enough of everything, so you keep thinking about new routes and better intersections so that everyone gets in time for their dream goods.
And just like in the Mini Metro, you are moving away imperceptibly all the time. While at the beginning of the construction of the new city you are so close that only a few buildings fill the entire screen, at the end of your endeavor you see the whole city with dozens of shops, many more houses and twice as many cars on the roads.
Zooming out on a static camera is so lazy that you usually don’t realize it at all, and if you happen to notice it, you will always be surprised by the path you have taken in that moment. This only further completes the Zen atmosphere. If the creators gave you control over the movement and zoom of the camera, Mini Motorways would take much of its magic. Fortunately, they didn’t.
They have given you only a few tasks to take care of, which you can do with the help of the left (drawing roads) and right (deleting roads) mouse button. Even so, it is a surprisingly complex building strategy that will bother your brain in places, for which it will sweetly reward you with a better resolved traffic situation and will never take you out of peace.
It’s a brilliant, minimalist, but bigger, more sophisticated, nicer and more specific game than the Mini Metro was too abstract. So far, I’ve been happy to return to the Mini Metro, but now I don’t have a single reason. In short, Mini Motorways has far outgrown the shadow of its already excellent predecessor.
