Mini Motorways
Who’d be a city planner?
$9.99 From dinopoloclub.com
Needs macOS 10.15 or later
Every driver knows bad traffic. If you think you could do a better job of road planning, Mini Motorways is your chance to prove yourself.
The game sets you the task of connecting houses to destinations from a bird’s–eye view. Each car needs to make it to a destination of a matching color, whereupon it collects a pin that gets added to your score, then drives home and repeats the process. More cars are added as the game progresses, and every so often you get power–ups like traffic lights, roundabouts, and highways to improve your road network.
The top–down, quirky visuals fit perfectly and make you feel like a god who is by turns omnipotent and powerless. The music is often calm and relaxing. Some tracks, though, are ominous and brooding, which doesn’t help to alleviate your mounting panic as things head south.
When you get the roads right, Mini Motorways is relaxing and enjoyable. Cars zip smoothly along on their repetitive journeys, traffic jams exist only in the realm of fantasy, and all is well in your tiny world.
When it goes wrong, however, it quickly gets stressful. The more cars that get released onto your streets, the more the traffic builds up, and those roads and roundabouts that served you so well in the early game quickly betray you as they clog up with immobile cars.
If you don’t collect enough pins from a destination because your cars are stuck in traffic, it fills to bursting point. Leave too many uncollected pins and a timer starts ticking down above the building, trilling every few seconds. As your congested city becomes gridlocked, more destinations start chirping, yet sorting through the mess is arduous. Paralysis sets in, before the inevitable game over screen arrives.
You must simply survive as long as possible, so every game ends this way sooner or later. It forces you to make decisions strategically, thinking ahead and stockpiling power–ups to alleviate the inescapable disasters. Maybe this is how actual city planners feel. If so, we’re happy to stay at home reviewing Mac games instead.
THE BOTTOM LINE. By turns blissful and anxiety–inducing. ALEX BLAKE