Mini Motorways was one of my favorite games last year, below is the original review. It was released on the Nintendo Switch this month and I couldn’t be happier to have this game on the go. This game is so perfect for short car rides, long stretches of travel, hanging out in a library, or anywhere. Everything is here from the original game with the newest updates in lighting, new maps, and some other minor optimizations. While using joy-cons or the touch screen never feels as precise or smooth as the mouse and keyboard on the PC, the game plays very well. The zoom function feels a bit limiting being stuck to two settings, but that is really my only complaint. If you love Mini Motorways and want to take it on the road or you want a fantastic indie game that tests your organization skills while being both exciting and relaxing, you can’t go wrong picking this up for the Switch.
Original Review:
Never in my life did I think organizing traffic and setting up highways would be fun, let alone one of the best games I’ve played this year. Mini Motorways is a straightforward game of placing roads between houses and stores. The complexity and challenge come from placing roads and organizing a city with the materials given to you and having the flow of traffic as smooth and fast as possible. With some minor instances of bad luck here and there, this game is easily one of the most engaging and satisfying games I’ve played in 2021.
As I mentioned above, the premise of the game is easy to grasp: connect places so cars can go to and come back from their destinations. The real fun of the game comes from the chaos that grows after you have to make streets, highways, stoplights, circles, and more to connect an infinitely growing city. Each game starts out with just one store and a few houses of the same color. Players will connect those with roads that get filled with cars by going back and forth between the houses and stores. As the game goes on, more stores will be added, different color houses will need to be connected to different colored stores and then things become a desperate game of optimization. As time goes on also, players will be given resources to use throughout the city like bypasses, bridges, stoplights, and more. These can help the flow of traffic a lot if used well. There is a lot of nuance to these road systems, and it is amazing how well the game slowly builds from quaint and calm to chaotic and complex.
The game comes with a series of cities to build your roads on. Each city has score goals, leader boards, and challenges. These are pretty fun and offer a pretty large amount of challenge and hours of content. But the game does exactly what each arcade game should do; have a weekly and daily challenge. As of now, there are no rewards for winning those challenges (that’s honestly fine because of the general leader board), but some kind of badge next to your name would look cool on the leaderboards showing how often you win.
The only issues with this game are its lack of rewards and the bad luck that rarely happens. Sometimes, I’ll be playing through a map and never get enough highways or other things that I feel like I need. The game is meant to eventually overwhelm you naturally, but once in a great while, the game seems to forget you need stoplights or something else. This has only happened to me a couple of times, but it does make the round feel a bit unfair. Lastly, the lack of rewards can make the game’s lifespan a little shorter. If Mini Motorways added some different shaped cars, patterns on buildings, or custom color schemes as rewards for playing a lot or playing very well, there could be an even bigger reason for coming back.
Mini Motorways is one of those games that I’ll hop on solely because I want to enjoy the experience, but then lose the next few days and a dozen hours on wanting to play over and over again while trying to get better and better scores. I hope to see a bit more updates in possibly customized cities, player-made levels, or reward systems, but the game stands very tall on its own as it is now. It is entertaining, engaging, and accessible by all levels of gamers, I couldn’t recommend it enough.
