Mini Motorways (2019)

Mini Motorways may seem like a simple game made for shorter sessions but the level of challenge and its growing complexity mean that it packs enough for many, many hours of entangled engagement with its gameplay mechanics. The audiovisual environment is minimalistic but suits the gameplay quite well while players find themselves more and more enraptured by the expanding cities they will have to connect in order to prevent chaos from spreading across the roads.

Featuring a decent number of cities and nice combinations of challenges, Mini Motorways is great when you are craving short bursts of puzzles as dynamic as the road traffic. This strategy simulation game is addicting and a half-an-hour session can easily stretch to a few hours as you attempt to “beat the traffic” and inch closer to yet another high score with “just one more try”. Its soundscape, like the vrooms and ticking of the changing traffic lights, is surprisingly relaxing and adds much intriguing flavor to the sleek minimalistic menu screens. While I do not feel particularly compelled to return to the game regularly for its daily or weekly challenges, my trips to the 14 cities were certainly fun while they lasted.

Mini Motorways is in many, well, ways, a terrific, truly addictive pick-up-and-play game for the Switch. Its fast-paced level structure and simplicity are incredibly well conceived and feel great to come back to time and time again. I’ve always been a big fan of management games in this style like Air Control, so having a spin like this to the formula is definitely up my wheelhouse and you’d be remiss not to at least give it a look.

"What do you mean, how is urban planning difficult?"

With intuitive mechanics, a calming sound environment and an uncomplicated design, Mini Motorways is the perfect game to relax and at the same time work our gray matter. It's always rewarding to raise our high scores, while our losses are entirely attributable to our lapses in most cases. In the end, this is an addictive and cozy game that deserves the attention of all enthusiasts of the genre and will reward you for the time you invest in it.