Design the road map for a growing city.
Mini Motorways is a puzzle-simulation game developed and published by Dinosaur Polo Club, a follow-up to the studio's previous title Mini Metro. The game was released on September 19, 2019 for Apple Arcade and July 20, 2021 for Steam, with a Nintendo Switch release ocurring on May 11, 2022.Similar to Metro, the player is tasked with constructing major roadways for many real-life cities. Houses and destination buildings appear over time, and the player must build connecting roadways to get cars of the correct color to each building. The map will expand over time and the player will accumulate resources to keep pace, including additional road tiles, traffic lights and roundabouts to manage traffic flow, bridges and tunnels to pass terrain, and high-speed motorways that pass over most other obstacles.
Playable cities, in order of unlock:
- Los Angeles
- Beijing
- Tokyo
- London
- Mumbai
- New York City
- Dar es Salaam
- Moscow
- Munich
- Zurich
- Manila
- Rio de Janeiro
- Dubai
- Mexico City
- Wellington
- Warsaw
- Chiang Mai
- Lisbon
- Busan
- Reykjavik
Mini Motorways provides examples of the following tropes:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Just like the previous game, the realism of the city's infrastructure is misrepresented all for the Rule of Fun.
- Artistic License – Cars: All cars drive on the right side of the road, even in cities where left-hand traffic is the lawnote .
- Automatic New Game: After the title screen the game takes you to a tutorial sequence and then you jump into your first city.
- Bilingual Bonus: All of the natural locations in each city are written in their respective countries' native languages.
- Colorblind Mode: The game has a colorblind option that lets you customize the building colors for better contrast.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Different buildings are colored based on their use as well as their occupancy. One of the game's main aspects is to build roadways so that traffic can easily move to and from buildings based on their activity.
- Critical Existence Failure: Your city shuts down and the game is over if one building can't get traffic flowing to it within a period of time.
- Endless Game: Like in Mini Metro, the game ends if a destination doesn't get enough visitors within the time limit, but you can continue playing in Endless Mode, where your score is determined by the rate at which cars visit destinations instead.
- Gimmick Level: Challenge Mode offers various modifiers to normal gameplay, ranging from busier or denser building placements, having more or less of particular resources, or additional obstacles like being unable to remove trees. Each city has its own set of challenges, in addition to rotating daily and weekly challenges where the modifiers are randomized.
- Holiday Mode: The Reykjavik Update added two festive frames in Photo Mode for Christmas.
- Locomotive Level: London, Mumbai, and New York City have train stations as additional destinations for cars. In these levels, a train moves along the railway, blocking cars along the way, and momentarily stops at each station. Trains cannot be removed, so further planning is needed in building roads that cross railways.
- Luck-Based Mission: Challenges where the upgrades are a mystery or only one is given every week can either make or break a run because they rely on luck to get the upgrades you want.
- Photo Mode: At the end of the level, you can take a picture of your final layout. You can also add a frame, the level's title, score, and modifiers, or even remove the destination markers.
- Real-Time with Pause: The game can be paused anytime to plan ahead and freely edit your placed road tiles and upgrades.
- Shout-Out: Some of the achievements are pop-culture references:
- The achievement for placing 666 road tiles across multiple runs is called "Highway to Hell".
- Placing 25 traffic lights across multiple runs gets you the "Boogie Lights" achievement.
- Using all nine motorways in one run rewards you with the "Mom's Spaghetti" achievement.
- Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Expert Mode is unlocked after reaching a certain score for each city. It presents harder challenges such as permanently placed road tiles like in Mini Metro and limited upgrades.
