[Game: Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club, 2019]

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Mini Metrics:

Introduction:

Both Mini Metro and the studio’s more recent iteration on the formula, Mini Motorways, are a noticeable step up in execution from similar chill takes on the strategy genre such as Islanders and Reus. Unlike those other games, Dinosaur Polo Club’s mini city sims have a deceptively high skill ceiling, bear cohesive and striking visual styles, and include randomized elements in a way that offers a worthwhile challenge and texture rather than a source of frustration.

More than anything, though, what impresses me about Mini Metro and Mini Motorways is their elegance: the restraint of their visuals, including plain flat polygons and muted complementary colors to evoke utilitarian subway maps and route guides; the way their entire soundscapes are reliant on context-dependent sound effects and almost no music, starting things calm and naturally transitioning to a unique and sonorous cacophony later in a round; and the understated deftness of how the complexity of the playfield increases (in part) simply by zooming out the camera at a glacial, almost-imperceptible pace.

But the two games are not created equal. When the developers returned to the drawing board after Mini Metro and altered the design, I feel they took full advantage of that opportunity. Mini Motorways is a great example of what a video game sequel can and should do; despite feeling like an incredibly similar game in terms of both style and substance, it is a noticeable refinement of the template established by Mini Metro in numerous ways, five of which I’ll cover now:

5 Ways Mini Motorways is Better than Mini Metro:

For clarity’s sake, both Mini Metro and Mini Motorways offer a light mode and a dark mode for their visuals. I’ve just opted to keep the screenshots of the older game in light and the screenshots of the newer game in dark so it’s as easy as possible for you to discern which is which in this article at a glance. Anyway, here are the five biggest ways Mini Motorways provides the better experience of the two:

First, turning basic pathing into its own currency (roads) aids tremendously in balancing upgrade options. An interchange will very rarely be more valuable than a carriage or a line, and the same is true of a roundabout in comparison with a motorway—but there are times where getting 20 roads rather than 10 is essential and outweighing.

Second, there is a longer delay on reconfiguration of existing designs in Motorways, which results from the requirement to let all extant trips complete their usage of the old path before reusing resources. This better matches with the theming and chill atmosphere of the game than Metro’s reconfiguration mechanics, which involve nonsensically and instantaneously warping locomotives and carriages around the moment they’ve reached a stop and deposited their passengers. This change single-handedly shifts the lion’s share of late-game success away from obsessive micromanagement and toward efficient, strategic infrastructure design.

Third, similarly, giving control over infrastructure alone (rather than both infrastructure and vehicles) aids in strategic depth. Not only can you never teleport a unit directly to its destination anymore, but separating the vehicles from the elements over which the player has direct control allows them to offer unique challenges. That is, while the trains in Metro can be placed by the player in any orientation (and so clip through each other and carry on), the cars in Motorways live on their roads and take up space. As a result, intersections and rail crossings become noticeable sources of friction, and have to be thought through—to avoid not just unnecessary stops but also unnecessary deceleration. And efficient pathing is doubly incentivized when compared to the older game, as now you conserve both the time taken by unit traversal and the now-limited road resource as well.

Fourth, not allowing paths to intersect without joining unless a designated upgrade is used (the eponymous motorway) quietly demands considerable extra care in decisionmaking. This helps the newer title to more productively replace the mental load which had been alleviated by no longer having to constantly warp vehicles around.

Fifth, Mini Motorways is undoubtedly the more aesthetically pleasing game. Not only does its soundscape never grate in the way that the chirping of numerous overcrowded late-game metro stations do in the earlier release, but the broader color palettes and slightly increased level of detail offers really visually pleasing results toward the end of a round. I’ve got this point bringing up the rear, though, as that additional detail does bring a couple arguable drawbacks.

The more obvious drawback is that Mini Metro’s thematic inspiration, namely simplified metro route maps, is much clearer and well-realized in the final product than whatever the look of Mini Motorways is going for. It doesn’t really look like an old road map—maybe more of a vague middleground between a sim city and a model city, like a kid dumped the cars out of the board game Life and the houses and hotels out of Monopoly. Like I said, though, the result is still nice to look at. Just doesn’t feel like a utilitarian object that came to life in the same way as Mini Metro.

The less obvious drawback of its increased detail is that (especially in such a slow-paced game that leaves the player so much time to think) carelessly peeling away layers of abstraction in a simplified civilization sim can lead to some strange situations. What I mean is: in both games, efficiency is often a matter of finding pathing solutions that group travelers and their intended destinations as tightly as possible, with minimal interruption from those bound elsewhere. In Metro, for the more common shapes like triangles and circles grouping passengers and destinations almost always means diversifying a line to avoid chains of identical stations. But you still might run a discrete line, possibly paired with an interchange, to collect and deposit rarer shapes like stars or pentagons. Now, it’s all well and good to be making a special line to shuttle the pentagons around without too much clutter from triangles—but I find the experience feels somewhat different in Motorways, where you’ll be running separated roads to keep the blue folks in their blue cars and their blue houses and their blue destinations, and then to the greatest degree possible enforcing a separate community for pink folks and for purple folks and for, well, uh, in the screenshot below the other communities we’re trying not to mix would be the, uh, white folks and yellow . . . I think you can see where this is going.

2 Small Ways Mini Motorways Could Improve:

There you have it. Overall, a wonderful iteration on a simple formula. But this is not to say it’s flawless. Even setting aside the aesthetic complications mentioned at the end of the last section, there are still a couple minor annoyances present in both games. These are elements which could be addressed in updates to the existing games, or which could serve as ideas for polish on a hypothetical third game in the series. Either way, like the foregoing list, fixes here would speak to the iterative process of refining a game concept.

The more minor annoyance of the two is that both titles should definitely default to the ‘fast-forward’ speed from the second round played onward. At default speed the first couple in-game weeks are excruciating, and there’s really no reason a single round of either game should take over half an hour. That’s around the time commitment of a run of Slay the Spire . . . nothing ‘mini’ about that. But it’s still a relatively small problem because fast-forward can be enabled just a few seconds after starting each round. Arguably there should be a third (even higher) speed unlocked at some point along the journey, but I could see that potentially conflicting with the devs’ vision for the game so its absence is understandable.

The biggest annoyance shared by both games, though, is the way they lock their higher difficulty setting behind repeated per-map milestones. Most players are definitely not going to have the patience to play each of Mini Motorways’ couple dozen maps twice each, first on classic and then in a challenge, just so they can then play each of them a third time on expert mode. Much like Extreme mode in Mini Metro, Expert mode in Mini Motorways is a great setting which offers a well-reasoned and interesting adjustment to the game’s rules. I can even comprehend the impulse to lock it away to begin with. But it should become available on all maps simply after a first demonstration of expert skill, such as by achieving 4000 passengers in a single round on any one map in Metro, or 5000 trips in a single round on any one map in Motorways. Mini Metro actually does slightly better than its younger sibling in this regard, by not initially locking out challenges on new maps. If the games are going to include a higher difficulty setting, there’s no need to make players who prefer the game that way jump through repetitive hoops to enable it map by map.

Conclusion:

That’s more than enough said. No need to linger here; I understand that’s how overcrowding happens. They’re both neat games, and each offers an amusing and relaxing way to get a mini hit of strategy gameplay.

And the slight-but-clear superiority of Mini Motorways over its predecessor in terms of both the mechanical balance of its strategy gameplay and the cohesion of its mechanics, themes, appearance, and atmosphere—seems to me a fine demonstration of how video game sequels frequently provide laudable iterative improvement on their series’ designs.