Product test
Carrera Hybrid is the slot car of the future
by Ramon Schneider
«Mini Motorways»: fancy a bit of traffic planning during your lunch break?
29.1.2022
Translation: Eva Francis
«Mini Motorways», released on Apple Arcade, offers the perfect pastime for amateur road network builders. Lean back and enjoy – or go on a traffic planning frenzy.
What’s the game about? That's quickly explained: you're responsible for the traffic planning of a city. For the sake of simplicity, all residents of this city drive their own cars. So you don't have to think about timetables and how individual and public transport work together. The people in your city drive either red, blue, green, black or yellow cars. And they always head for a building that's the same colour as their car.
The goal of «Mini Motorways»
Your task is to create the fastest connection for the cars to the matching colourful buildings. This is quite simple at the beginning, but quickly becomes more difficult. As the game progresses, the houses and buildings pop up at places on the map where you don't need them: too far away from the matching target building or in the middle of a village of differently coloured houses.
This makes building roads demanding and slows down traffic – and at some point, inevitably leads to the end of the game, which is reached when the target buildings can no longer be reached regularly and frequently enough, as the small cars lose too much time in traffic jams. For you, this means that you have to develop strategies to keep things moving.
The graphics are kept pretty simple. The sound effects and music provide atmosphere, but are never annoying. I especially like the fact that I can play the game with the mouse. The left mouse button lets me build a road; the right mouse button removes it. It’s simple. I need neither keyboard nor controller. That’s lucky, because I haven’t used them in years and can't even play a simple racing game with keyboard and controller.
How to succeed in «Mini Motorways»
Despite appearing simple, «Mini Motorways» is a strategic challenge. After a few rounds, you realise that too many cars in different colours and with correspondingly different destinations are causing congestion on your roads. If this happens, the game is over sooner than you’d wish.
My verdict: «Mini Motorways» is both simple and complex
The game mechanics of «Mini Motorways» remind me a bit of Tetris, the forefather of puzzle games. The better you get, the harder the task becomes. At least, I can now click «Pause the game» if I need to and can completely rethink and redo all the road connections to prevent the traffic system from collapsing.
«Mini Motorways» is included in Apple Arcade. It's also available on Steam for about $10. And it’s supposed to be released for the Nintendo Switch soon.
Martin Jungfer
Head of Content
Martin.Jungfer@digitecgalaxus.chJournalist since 1997. Stopovers in Franconia (or the Franken region), Lake Constance, Obwalden, Nidwalden and Zurich. Father since 2014. Expert in editorial organisation and motivation. Focus on sustainability, home office tools, beautiful things for the home, creative toys and sports equipment.
Gaming
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