Mini Motorways Reviews

Game has nice aesthetic. Seems buggy, and the logic and playability are not great. As for bugs, sometimes you get a traffic light at the beginning of a turn and then it is not available. Also, you can’t seem to access the tutorial easily. Cannot find it. As for logic and playability, where to start. It just isn’t clear what’s going on. The traffic lights, freeways, they don’t have noticeable logical effects. It is not clear what is rewarded. Are you trying to make an efficient network? Then it just isn't that clear why your network starts to get bogged down or what you can do about it. The road placing and delete function can be counterintuitive and glitchy. At some point the game changes dramatically and road tiles are extremely scarce after being abundant and you die without any sense of what you could have done differently. What ever the five principals of good game design might be, this effort is not embodying them. You get the sense this Apple Arcade offering is intended to get folks interested in their subway game, which is a $4 game. I suspect that one may be better designed but don’t want to pay to find out. Also this game is such a natural vehicle for environmental thinking, and yet they fumble the opportunity completely. Like, I wanted to create the most efficient network and the game seems to reward or force roundabout routes. That’s it for me.

This game is fun. My girlfriend showed me this game and not gonna lie I wasn’t interested at first, but once I started playing, I enjoyed it. The strategy involved, the design, and the casual/relaxing play really bring the game together as a full package. I really think this could be a 5 star game.

The only issue I’ve had is with a bug in the game the devs have known about for a least a year now. The bug involves saving your data to iCloud. As you progress, your progression is saved in iCloud. The bug prevents this saving progress and so, you could play the game, progress to a stage, and then open the game later and all that progression could be lost. I’m at the point where I’m seemingly permanently stuck at the Tokyo stage, even though I have achievements and have unlocked stages up to the manila stage. The most frustrating part about it is that this is a paid (monthly!) game, and they (still) haven’t found a fix for this bug. What is the point of playing/getting addicted to the game, if you can’t progress?

I would’ve rated this game a one star bc the flaw is so fundamentally game breaking. Instead I rated the game 2 stars because the game is actually fun. It’s the only reason why I felt compelled to write this review- I thoroughly enjoyed the game and am sad that it has this bug.

Great game that gets a bit addicting but there is definitely room for improvement. First, just a small annoyance… when clicking on the timer to bring up the controls it’s too slow. There’s no point to having such a slow animation to display the controls. Second, the most frustrating thing is having businesses pop up on completely opposite sides of the map constantly with the driveway in the worst possible position with no possible way you’d be able to have enough tiles to connect things. I get that the randomness makes it challenging, but some of the logic needs updating so it doesn’t make things impossible. I’ve had businesses pop up 20+ tiles away from anything late into a game with the driveway on the far side and houses pop up just as far in the opposite direction. Again, fun game, but hopefully they make some improvements so you can actually use some strategy instead of being forced to place the least amount of tiles possible. If that’s the case, then you’re basically just connecting the dots and it’s not fun at all. UPDATE: I downgraded it another star because it’s getting to the point that it’s more frustrating than fun. It’s literally just connecting the dots without the ability to use strategy to make traffic flow more smoothly since you never have enough resources.

Love this game and it’s simplicity. I think some of the suggestions people have made are great. I don’t mind the randomness of WHERE the houses and stores show up. I think that planning ahead for situations where houses are on the other side of the map is fun. You could include difficulty levels to help with that though, where easy mode makes sure that houses only spawn within a certain distance of stores of the same color. Where I have a major issue though is with the algorithm controlling the ratio of houses to stores. I literally just played a game where I ended up with 4 green stores on the map (3 regular and one big store), and only 5 houses. Even if all the stores were next to each other and the houses were right by them, I still would have failed because the demand was too high. This makes me feel like why even bother trying to keep playing if there’s a solid chance that I’ll be faced with an impossible task anyway? I really enjoy the planning side of the game and being the master of my own destiny with how I lay out my grids, but making it possible (and likely even) to lose no matter what I do just feels like it goes against the ethos of the game itself. A simple recalibration of the houses to stores algorithm would fix this issue. In my opinion there should always be twice as many houses as there are stores at any given moment.

Don’t get me wrong; this game is fun and addicting for not only just to waste time while watching TV or lounging around. But there is a serious bug/break in the game that can immediately ruin your game.
When there is an intersection, either with or without a traffic light, sometimes traffic just completely stops and then your city fails. There is no fix I have found, other than completely removing all the roads in that area and frantically putting them back if you can, to hopefully get the traffic going.
It’s especially bad when you are in the 500+ commuters area, and then (ex) yellow buildings need items picked up, then they go into the red pop up timer meaning it needs a lot of cars right now. All of your yellow cars besides maybe 3-4 are stuck not moving at all. They will just be frozen, and all it takes is ONE car to be broken at an intersection for the entire map to be completely bricked.
It’s especially frustrating when I can just look at where everything is going wrong and all I can do it sit and stare at it, and wait for my city to get shut down and I have to restart.

I loved the idea of this game when I read the description which I think is misleading. One of the first things it says is “have you ever thought you could fix traffic?” The implication is that with thoughtful building you can actually make traffic work, kind of like a SimCity type game for traffic. That sounds fun. But that’s not what this game is. It’s more like a tower defense game with escalating problems that eventually overwhelm you. You don’t get enough control to actually make traffic better; it’s more responding to the dysfunctional problems that you’re given until they eventually, inevitably, overwhelm you. That’s fine; nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the game that’s being described.

That said, I enjoy the game and it’s kind of fun. I’d still enjoy it if it were described properly. I wish it were the game I thought it was and I want to find one like that, but it’s still okay. There are things that are really frustrating though. Stoplights need to work better. You should be able to make your own entrances to buildings so you can built around them. And you should be able to demolish houses. I think a version of the game where the buildings were random but you had to build your own house (maybe in designated areas) would be a lot more fun. Either way, game is kind of fun, but not a lot of replayability since it’s just keeping up with escalating dysfunction until you eventually fail.

I love this game. But this latest update has killed it. It’s obsurdly hard to play on a phone now that you’ve removed the zoom feature. Especially on cities like Lisbon. It’s so bad I’m going to have to stop playing until the zoom is returned because it’s just too frustrating. I don’t even have large hands but even I keep making roads and things in wrong places because the area you’re expected to touch is the size of a pearl head pin. Please return the zoom!

Update: I read about the update and see you did add zoom. But as far as I can tell, it’s not pinch to zoom. It’s the old tap once to zoom in to a pre-determined amount. Not a customizable zoom like pinch to zoom. And most importantly, it was changed to auto default to off! So now you have to go to settings, options, and then toggle zoom on and pick what kind of zoom you want. But none of the descriptors like close or far mean much. So you just have to pick one and play a whole game with it to see if it’s the right kind of zoom for you. And there are something like five or more options to choose from. Seems needlessly complicated. However, now I’ve at least got the old tap to zoom feature back, I’ve updated my rating from 2 stars to 4.

I love this game and it is a lot of fun to play again and again. The graphics are great, gameplay is super and it is definitely worth checking out.

Unfortunately, the traffic light is not helpful and I wish there were more of a variety of power ups instead like ‘eminent domain’ where you could remove a house that has spawned in a spot that gums up traffic/blocks the ability to have a straight path and ‘renovation’ that would allow a rotation of a building/change of entrance into the buildings or to add a second entry. ‘Clown car’ that magically clears all the waiting pawns in one car pickup. Color zone where you could pick a few squares that would populate with one specific color when it would be time to spawn a house in that that color. Finally ‘work from home’ where there would be a pause on new workers for a span of 1 to a few days.

I think those kinds of power ups would increase the ability to create different strategies and salvage a great game that too often falls apart with no solutions with the current power ups on hand - my best scores often seem to come from luck than strategy. And so some ways to bring in more strategy would keep me playing for many more hours.

I think the game is pretty entertaining and interesting. I love games where you get to build and design things, and it’s even better when those things are actually used! The one major change I’d make is to add some sort of free play mode. You could have multiple modes for it. You could have a mode where it’s just the base game but you have unlimited resources to play with, the ability to turn on and off the game over function, and a mode where you can place your own buildings. Heck, you could even have a high score for unlimited resource base game. Other than that, it would be better if the game just had more content. You can quickly “beat” all the levels in a day, then it’s just a game of high scores, and maybe some people like that, but it just gets old for me. Maybe you could unlock new levels that have different things? You could add train tracks as an obstacle, a train could pass through a predesignated path and vehicles have to wait for it. Idk, the point is the game lacks content. Idk how much money these games make, but I pay for Apple Arcade, so is like the games to be a little more than the normal free to play games. It feels like a free to play game that’s just not riddled with ads.

I’m not your average gamer, but I took a chance on this one because the concept was solid and the graphics were simple and well put together. However, as much as I was enjoying the challenge, the rate at which buildings populate is way too fast. There is a lack of gradual increase in difficulty and before you know it, it’s game over. Further, And I find this part funny, is that this game really captures the idiocy that faces our real world roads today.

I think the game could be improved by slowing down the rate of new buildings popping up, and by giving the player the option to start on smaller towns first. That way, the player can develop a plan more or less of how to tackle traffic flow issues by trying them in a smaller population to ensure they work, rather than waste time in the larger cities hoping it will help.

One additional thing, it would be great is we could rotate new factories, not move them, just rotate them, mostly due to the fact the parking lot/entrance allows for only one road and faces a specific direction. Overall, love the game, still enjoy it every time I have to start over, lol.

I found this game highly addictive especially as someone who loves city building games like simcity. Managing the traffic has a kind of zen quality that I find super calming. The visual language of the game is spot on with each location feeling different through thoughtful color selection without being too pastiche.

I do wish there were just a few more options like one way streets or roundabouts(rotaries). I also miss the time lapse feature from mini metro to watch the growth of the city. Finally, the navigation logic of the cars is a bit tough to work with as it seems like they all go for the shortest route regardless of traffic. This I’m sure is the most processor intensive aspect of the game and is maybe why my battery drops 20% after playing it for 10 minutes... :) hopefully there’s a way to improve this too. Regardless, someone has been destroying the high scores and I would love to see what their strategies are (hopefully not cheating).

Looking forward to playing this game over and over as they provide updates and improvements. In the meantime still a great time waster.

I normally am not a huge fan on mobile games, since the video games I enjoy most are complex story games. However, there have been a couple mobile games that I become absolutely addicted to and this game is one of them. It’s simplistic, easy to learn, and great to play when you’re just doing nothing for five minutes.

As much as I love it, I think it needs a couple additions. There needs to be a fix with the traffic lights, because every time I try to use one, it makes the situation worse. I tend to just avoid them all together now. I also think there should be some more infrastructure options. Maybe a four lane road? Also, since I love the simplistic design and art style of the game, I’d love if there was a zen mode of sorts where you could just build away without limits. I love it when the city starts to get bigger and there’s neighborhoods and city blocks.

Even though I think it needs some improvements, this game is one of my favorite phone games ever! (I also absolutely love the sound design and music. I try to turn my sound on whenever I play❤️).

I enjoy this game a lot , coming from mini metro I actually enjoy this more. It has great potential to be 5 stars. The biggest issue with this game is how it goes out of its way to make things difficult/unbearable, I’ve had buildings pop up in tight corners and then houses pop up behind those buildings that become unreachable. Further into a game the traffic even if flowing is not fast enough to accommodate the supply being dropped not to mention how houses for buildings ends up on the far side of the map. Traffic light I’ve tried to accommodate but is useless, and when you need a motorway it mostly never is one of the two options. A sandbox mode with objectives would be great and then a free play mode with no risks would be too just like mini metro has, hopefully this is coming. A new road type would also be nice with a 4 lanes, one way roads and also a 3 and 5 lane with middle lane left turns. Maybe stop signs instead of traffic lights. This is a game about roads, transportation and logistics so hopefully the devs incorporate those things. Thanks for a great game with amazing potential.

Hi everyone. I never write reviews for games but I felt like this one deserved a review. Mini Motorways is a flaming strategy based yet simple for anyone to play kind of game. The game starts off easy and progressively gets harder as more destinations and houses pop up. I love the challenge this game gives the player whiteout frustrating them like some puzzle game do. In addition, the graphics are neat and the whole ambience of the game is relaxing. I have tried many games on Apple Arcade but this one beats them all and I would immediately cancel my subscription if it were not for this game.
I don’t have any huge suggestions since I think the game really nailed it in all aspects! The only suggestion is that it would really cool to have an upgrade like the traffic lights and motorways that speeds up the cars on a particular road. This upgrade could be given when a player gets to a higher level week but it would make things even more exciting. Sometimes, it became difficult to change the roads when fees cars can reach the destination and having this sort of power-up/ upgrade (whatever you wanna call it) would make it more enjoyable.
Overall, thanks so much Dinosaur Polo Club for creating such an addictive game!

This is a fun game to play. Me and my friends are always trying to out do each other. I can definitely tell they've tweaked the game to be harder. It can be very challenging on some levels and gets pretty ridiculous but it's fun. They DO NEED to fix the car routes. They take some dumb routes for literally no reason and then you gotta spend time trying to fix the traffic jam bc of it. I will purposely fix things to stop certain colors taking that route but somehow some will take an alter longer route for no reason... Don't know if that's on purpose or what... But still fun

Critical Reviews: Stop complaining about paying a monthly subscription to play the game. There are like 200 other games with that subscription you get with no ads or microtransactions. And they're not crappy games either, there are plenty to enjoy that justify your monthly subscription. Your 1 star reviews bc of that are ridiculous and baseless.

Loss of scores/saves: I've had this game since it came out and switched phones a few times. I've NEVER lost a save point or my high scores. Really don't know what those people are on about. Sounds like it has more to do with their phones than the game. I've never had any issues.

Has new challenges daily and weekly. You get to build roads all over the world. The game just got an update that added tons of different modes for any play style so the game is constantly changing and improving. Although I was skeptical at first and it was not what I thought it was, the game is unlike anything I've ever played and is one of the top strategy games out. I would recommend this game to anybody because it's very easy to learn, but also will challenge anyone who loves strategy games, and once you get going you don't want to stop. I believe it is not just one of the best strategy games out but one of the best games out period. They are adding new features all the time and it still hasn't reached its full potential. I recommend you download this game right now and play through it for a week, no matter who you are or what type of games you are into, and I promise you'll be hooked. I love trying to get the highest score I can to compete with other players around the world also. Although I mostly play it for the fun of it, I also like the competitive aspect of it as well. Build the roads and the cars will come...very fast so be ready to build your roads! The last thing you want is to cause a traffic jam! That's when it's GAME OVER!

I actually never even had heard of apple arcade until an ad popped up for this game. I got the free trial and have been paying for it since ONLY for mini motorways. I play a few more but I would not pay for them if it wasn’t for this game specifically.

Now that being said, there are quite a few things I would suggest improving. Like the stop-light would probably be better served as an all-way stop-sign instead. And pleeease could you make the cars turning animation faster. They seem to slow down way too drastically and that creates a domino effect on the cars behind it slowing the whole chain of cars downhill. Another big change I would propose is make it so bridges can be used in the city to go over other roads, so we can connect without being forced to have an intersection where there isn’t necessarily one needed.

I also want to be (hopefully) the first to request a whole new game mode, called “Ghost Mode.” where the cars can cross intersections unimpeded. Say a car is going to the right and a car is going straight up. These two cars meet at an intersection. In the normal mode, these cars would slow down and the game would decide which car would have the right of way, usually based on who’s there a fraction of a second sooner. BUT in this mode they both would continue at full speed and just cross without being effected by the other.

I really enjoy playing this while I am relaxing or need to destress. The art style and sound design really help to promote the zen feeling they’re going for. And I just love watching the cars zip around and the city flowing more and more as the levels progress and get busier. I got this game for PC and mobile because I like it so much.
There’s not much to criticize about this as I haven’t run into any bugs or glitches. But I could offer some suggestions. For one, being able to manually zoom in and out would be really helpful. As of now when you want to edit the roads, it zooms in at a set amount which is a little too close for me to see what I’m doing (especially if I’m trying to build long roads or motorways). Also, I wish there was a freeplay/sandbox mode where you could build roads to your hearts content. It would be a great way to practice as I oftentimes have trouble when traffic starts building up. So a way to practice managing that without losing would help. It would also be a nice relaxing mode to play with.

I love this game! Just got a suggestion, add semi trucks and One way roads. it would be cool with that. and I have one more idea could you make a new game called mini airways. I would be so excited if you could do. that aren’t a lot of airport airport games. As for the semi trucks, they can have two color truck depots that make any other color cargo and they will bring that color cargo to the one main big loading station. Then the cargo will be picked up by the color of the trucks that the cargo was. Example; the red trucks have a green container at their depot. Then depending on how much containers are at the depot, the same number of trucks will bring the containers to the main loading station and drop them off so the green trucks can pick them up and bring them back to their depot. And there can be more than one of the main loading stations and more truck colors, not just red and green. And there can be more color containers at one time at one depot. If you can please add this to mini motorways that would be so awesome.

I love this game. Everything from the deceptively simple beginning to the chaotic mess that you end up with makes this game amazing. I’m definitely not the best player but it’s a lot of fun. It’s a 100% recommendation from me! While playing, however, I noticed a couple of things that could be fixed or improved on.

The traffic lights only seem to make the traffic more congested, I’m not sure how to fix this but so far, they just seem pretty useless. Another problem that I felt while playing was that there’s no sense of accomplishment. Once you’ve beat all the maps, there’s nothing keeping you tied to the game. I wish there were some more accomplishments or small in-game puzzles you could solve. Another small issue that may be a bit harder to combat was how the phone/tablet over heats after a while. It gets scalding hot really fast. Other than those things though, this game is great and I definitely recommend everyone to play it!

One thing that I saw in another review that I actually really liked was a free play mode where you could make and put down your own houses and buildings without the fear of losing or running out of time. One of my favorite parts of the game is building roads for the houses and watching the cars drive to their destination. A free play mode would definitely meet those needs!