And yet… something about Mini Motorways evokes none of that stress, of that frustration. The sprites for gridlocked roads from SimCity SNES and SimCity 2000 are seared into my mind from the many hours they spent taunting me. I love city builders, but the intricacies of road design and avoiding traffic jams are always my least favorite part of titles like Cities Skylines. In reality they are very similar, but also different in a few precise and cleverly-calibrated ways that ultimately make Mini Motorways the far superior of the two. That game was built around railway infrastructure - but the freedom of the open road means that somehow the options you have on the table at any given moment gives this game’s action the impression of being less constrained than its predecessor. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very similar to a Dinosaur Polo Club title, Mini Metro. If things get too clogged up, it’s game over. Buildings are color coded - so blue homes will spit out cars of the same color that need to make their way to blue businesses - and therefore quickly the game’s randomly spawning infrastructure will force you to make hard decisions about moving around resources to keep the city moving. Your job is to carefully juggle the needs of the city with the resources you have, producing a layout that minimizes traffic jams. You have a limited amount of roads and accessories such as roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, and of course motorways at any given time. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Buildings large and small crop up as time progresses, and your job is simply to connect everything up in a sensible manner that encourages further growth. You create a city, but this isn’t a typical city builder: all you have to do is craft the road system. Originally released via Apple Arcade and now available on PC, the concept of the game is blissfully, eighties-design era simple. With that said, every now and then a game pops up that I truly cannot lay any significant fault at - and one such release is Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Motorways. Does a perfect video game actually exist? I think there’s a strong argument for the idea that a truly perfect game - or any piece of art, for that matter - can never really happen.

Traffic light mini motorways