December 29, 2023 - Day 363 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 392

Game: Mini Motorways

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jul 21, 2021
Installation Date: July 27, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 34m

Mini Motorways is a minimalistic cozy top-down traffic puzzle strategy game from New Zealand developers Dinosaur Polo Club. It's a follow-up to their previous railway puzzle strategy game Mini Metro.

Following on from the design aesthetic in Mini Metro, Mini Motorways presents you with a grid, initially containing one stylised house, and one stylised destination, in the same colour, and provides (n) road pieces to join the two.

Cars in that colour will then travel back and forth between the two locations. The destination building will tick, adding an icon for which a matching car is required, with each building having a certain capacity. If the building reaches capacity without enough matching cars reaching it, it's Game Over, man. Game Over.

Each level is presented as a specific major world city, and achieving certain goals in one city will unlock one (or more) cities to play in further levels.

Levels are played on a "weekly" basis using an in-game clock; as the in-game week passes, new destination buildings are added, often in a different colour, with a matching house in the same colour.

These houses can be on the other side of a river, or the other side of the map, or both, and you must use the roads to enable enough vehicles to reach each destination before the building "fills up".

At the end of each week you are given one of two options to choose from for extra pieces for the following week. One option may be 30 road pieces, with the other being a roundabout, with 20 road pieces, or a bridge crossing, with 20 road pieces, or one of several other options including the titular motorway, allowing you to connect distant areas of the map in a single hit.

I broke my guideline of mentioning the developers because in spite of them having only released these two games, I love both of them. Mini Motorways is:

5: Excellent