Mini Motorways Review (The Bestagon)
It's just not as fun I hoped it would be. As a fan of Mini Metro I thought this would be right up my ally. But I feel there are too many detractors that push it into the "don't recommend" category. Some of them are:
The randomness - of where houses and businesses pop up, their colour, the end-of-week bonuses you get, of the amount of roads and rivers you'll need. For those looking to create order from chaos, the RNG just won't let you build a neat city. In this game, entropy beats planning every time.
The lack of clarity - you don't know why certain roads or intersections are congested. You don't know which car is going where. You just don't have any kind of information upon which to make decisions. You get a gentle visual feedback when a business isn't connected to it's customers, but you get no feedback when houses are not connected. You get a short sound and small visual cue when new houses appear, but good luck finding it in a big city. It's not easy to asses how well your road network is doing because the indicators are all over the place. It would be great if all this information was collected for you into some kind of list.
The sluggishness - when you get the sound that something is going wrong, like a business not getting enough customers and the timer started counting - it's usually already too late and you're about to lose. Any modifications you make to the roads takes ages to take effect because all existing cars have to finish using the old layout before the new one appears, and by that time you've lost. The timers on buildings are very short, so unless you can spot issues way ahead of time, it's game over. Quite brutal and really, just not fun. If you alert me of a problem, at the very least give me a reasonable chance to fix it.
Optimisation - I love optimising in games. I'm not comparing this to Factorio, but even Train Valley 2 has more rewarding optimisation mechanics. In this game, you mostly make haphazard change in hopes you make a difference for the better (with no way of actually being able to tell if the trend changed). It's mostly a spray and pray approach: change a few roads here, add traffic light there, maybe a roundabout would help? Oh no, you don't have any more of those and you won't be getting one anytime soon (or never depending on which bonuses await you at the end of each week), so better just suck it up. Wanna reconfigure the whole city to free an existing roundabout? Good luck with that, it will take forever for any changes to apply. And once you remove existing features, they don't become available until they disappear so you can't build the next plan before the existing one is demolished, forcing you to have a dysfunctional city in between making changes.
Extreme minimalism - There are very few mechanics to this game, and you discover them all in the first few levels. Then there are just more world cities, but they're really all just the same. No new stuff, no increased complexity, just more of the same. Over and over and over. Even the tools that are offered are kneecapped in odd ways. You can place traffic lights at an orthogonal intersection (+), but you can't do it if it's rotated 45 degrees (X). Why not? You can place light at weird 3-way, 5-way or 6-way intersections with odd shapes, but two diagonal straight roads intersecting each other at 90 degrees? Not allowed.
Scale - okay, so the game doesn't introduce new elements. So what? You get to build bigger and bigger cities! But the gameplay doesn't actually scale at all. It just turns into a chaotic mess, with no tools to figure out what the problem is, and no tools to fix it even if you could. It collapses under it's own weight, leaving you with very little you can do about it. It's quite frustrating.
Lack of purpose - there are no goals, there is no win condition, there's no threshold to cross that you'd consider a success. Only getting past a very basic number of trips to unlock the next city (which is exactly the same as the previous one) and a few Steam achievements. So basically, every single time you play, you lose. You don't really know if you've done well or not (and even if you broke your own personal record, it's unclear why). You can compare your score to the global average, but that gets old, fast.
I really wanted to like this game, but just couldn't. It felt like my decisions, effort and skill were only tangentially affecting the game's outcome, and so it all feels meaningless. I enjoy games where I feel good about being clever, or feel bad about being so stupid, and wanting to do better next time. Not games where I reach the failure condition and ask myself why it happened, not be sure how I could have done it better, and not really wanting to try again because even if I succeeded the game offers no real progression, so what's the point?