As a huge fan of this developer's previous title, Mini Metro, I am very disappointed by Mini Motorways. It has many good qualities, but ultimately, my enjoyment was limited due to core game design issues. Your enjoyment of Mini Motorways may depend on what kind of player you are, and what kind of gameplay experience you are seeking. Read on to find out what I mean.


First, let me say that there are aspects of this game which are simply great without any qualifiers. Like its predecessor, Mini Motorways has a beautiful minimal art style. The visuals were clearly made by a team with an appreciation for graphic design. The sound design pairs perfectly with the visuals. It layers many gentle, pleasant tones to create a quiet yet busy background hum - the heartbeat of your tiny city. Placing road tiles makes a satisfying gentle "thud."

The graphics, UI, sound design, and user input experience all holistically work together to immerse the player in pleasant minimalism.


In order to describe why I find Mini Motorways fatally flawed, I must first describe what I love so much about Mini Metro.

In Mini Metro, train stations and passengers are represented by different shapes. The passengers that spawn at a station are always a DIFFERENT shape than that station. This means that the shape of the passenger represents the kind of trip they are on. For example: a square passenger spawning on a circle station might represent a person commuting from a residential circle to their job at a downtown square. A triangle spawning at the same circle station might represent that same passenger, but now they need to travel to a triangle shopping area.

This beautiful abstraction creates a system where the player needs to build a train system that reflects the challenge of real transportation: how to get people from one area to anywhere else in the city. High scores in the game represent an efficiently navigable city for passengers.


In Mini Motorways, the abstraction of passengers (or drivers in this case) falls apart. Because houses of one color always spawn cars of the same color, and they only drive to one color of location, these trips no longer represent any kind of real trip. Drivers can't be thought of as needing to access work, or shopping, or some other kind of trip, because they only ever need to go one place. No real driver behaves this way.

This creates a system where the optimal way to play is to construct a "city" that looks nothing like a real city. An efficient and high scoring Mini Motorways city does not reflect an efficiently navigable city at all. It is better to make a system of disconnected roads where houses of one color are only ever connected to the same kind of destination as much as possible. It creates scenarios where it can be better to leave some houses totally cut off from the roadways. or to use "roads" as spacing buffers or spawn blockers instead of roads at all.


If want to casually enjoy a relaxing art experience, Mini Motorways is very pleasant to look at and listen to.

If you enjoy the challenge of city planning, this game's design will incentivize you to plan a very bad, uninhabitable city.

If you want to solve abstract color matching puzzles, and you are uninterested in planning "cities," then you will likely be unconcerned with my criticisms and may find Mini Motorways very enjoyable.