7/14/2023 0 Comments Mini metro demoThis reward diminishes quickly with initial playthroughs taking roughly 3-5 hours, with Mini Motorways only promising a low-effort mental and fiscal investment from the player. Further, the only bittersweet satisfaction of clearing a stage with a good score is the promise of a new city unlock. Likewise, mountainous cities will require tunnels. A draw of the stages like Manila is having to optimise for bridges over canals. Unlike the main city stages, these are not introducing new reasons to play. There are daily and weekly challenges to fill in time. This isn’t a game with extraordinary staying power, and after you’ve had a crack at all 11 locations, there’s not an enticing enough reason to return outside of needing a peaceful shifter while playing on the loo. Although reviewed on PC, this review would wholeheartedly suggest playing this on Apple Arcade, sight unseen. Drawing roads with an Xbox One controller is unwieldy and won’t provide the same satisfaction as a precise input alternative. The most minor criticisms I can level at this splendid distraction regard the emotional void I’m left with when a level ends and some control quirks. If too many pins appear above location, a timer ticks down to indicate to the player that it’s time to crack knuckles and provide a bit of the old Ferguson congestion-busting (a joke for the Tassie readers. As the road network grows to the point of sprawling, cars may struggle to reach their destination in a timely fashion, resulting in pins representing demand appearing above the assumed workplaces. This is achieved courtesy of the gentle colour palettes, and entrancing soundtrack, and the satisfying bustle of little cars travelling to anonymous destinations that demand around-the-clock check-ins. But it is the most minor of details that give such a bland sales pitch the soul it needs. So abstract that when I first played it, I immediately shrugged it off as a prettied-up tech demo demonstrating something as seemingly mundane as simulating procedurally-generated network nodes that need routing. If this sounds like a lot, rest assured that this process is abstracted to such a point of absurd simplicity that it has shockingly wide audience appeal. The game provides no clear context to the consequences of our little seedling of a logistics empire, except that we are the omniscient god that must connect the arteries of a motorway courtesy of a weekly allotment of roads. These coloured shapes are abstracted representations of two nodes that must be connected on a network, with the matching pairs of shapes assumedly being the home and work locations of cohorts. A coloured square and a larger square of the same colour mark the humble first nodes of your network. This will now be something I seek to rectify right after this review, but for now I must sing the praises of the latest effort from New Zealand developer Dinosaur Polo Club.Ī game of Mini Motorways starts you in a geographically abstract location supposedly representing cities around the world such as Moscow, Los Angeles, and nine others. The follow-up title to Mini Metro is the gently challenging yet paradoxically serene game of traffic management, with the OG title being a veteran of the mobile game charts I’ve frequently seen yet not played. Mini Motorways symbolises a remedy for hard times, as I continue to try and make sense of the challenges facing Australia amidst a growing health crisis. Sometimes a game comes by at the perfect time a balm for an aching soul.
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