The Hong Kong challenge is BS. There is an 8 station limit per line. Sometimes you just don’t get enough lines to be able to handle all of the stations that pop up, even if you try and switch them around constantly. Also, I think that a new station just popped up and attached itself to an existing line, putting me over the 8 limit. I got real close in 1 try, but I can say I absolute hate this challenge.
I finally got the Hong Kong challenge but still think it’s BS. I didn’t actually think I was going to be able to do it because a 9th station did pop up onto one of my lines but I immediately paused the game and rerouted it to get it back down to 8. I guess I was quick enough or the game not to count it as #9. This was definitely the worst one yet.
I tried New York for a few more hours, but nothing worth posting since I can rarely get above 1000 lately. Last night I got royally screwed because anything on the New Jersey side was all circles, and anything on the Brooklyn/Queens side was all Triangles. That just made it impossible to manage.
Yeah, the game likes to screw the player by giving all of one kind of station in an area. Sometimes I go out of my way to route a line to a rare station even if it isn’t the best move distance wise. In normal mode you can always pick up a train and plink it down to save some travel time. The game definitely rewards the player willing to micro manage a lot.
I hadn’t played much in a while but when the thread got active again I’ve played quite a bit over the last week or so. I think I’m getting to the point where I need to put it down again, but I kinda want to get all of the unlocks for the hard mode. I still have 7 left so it might take a while. Perhaps better left for a different time when i get back into it.
I’ve just about 100%'d this game. Now I need to do the daily challenge for a week - I’m not sure I’ll remember. I got #13 on it so far for today’s challenge. I still need to put up some scores on the extreme version of some cities.
Wow, I found the majority of the more difficult achievements much too difficult/time consuming to pursue. I really did enjoy my time with the game, but I have no urge to play it anymore after 20 hours or so.
I’ve had the game for a while. I played it a lot when I got, put it down for many months, played some more - rinse and repeat. I’ve played quite a bit over the last week+. I think I have about 50 hours played in all.
Is the game better on PC vs iOS? I just bought it in Steam sale but thinking I might be more apt to play on tablet.
I bought the game in EA on a computer. I must have played it a lot more on iOS.
I had doubts about how good it would play: the game was a bit finnicky with the mouse, so I figured it would be worse with fingers. Turns out their touch control scheme is brilliant.
Anyway, my personal choice would be iOS.
Don’t tell me that, I could get addicted all over again on iOS, and it would be a lot easier to play too much on an iPad.
Really a great little game,
I downloaded this on Switch yesterday. Fun little game. Finicky with controller because the cursor jumps from node to node and getting to the specific one you want can be a bit of a chore and require lots of pausing for navigation when things are piling up. I haven’t tried portable/touch mode, but my switch is 99.9999~% a tv console anyway.
So far I’m enjoying my purchase.
The game is awesome, but I can’t inagine it being fun with a controller. The more difficult stages would be extremely frustrating. Try touch mode.
Mini Motorways, their new game, is out in Steam
This one is only ok. It’s been out on Apple Arcade for almost 2 years and I have played it off and on. While Mini Metro could be frustrating, I always felt like I could fix my layout and make it work (even when I failed). This game gets so congested that it often feels like there is nothing I can do to fix it. You can tear everything down to fix things, but that would be very time-consuming. It very well could be because I never developed a good strategy for it, but it never really grabbed me enough to want to try that hard.
That sounds correct to me. From a real life perspective. Trains are a solvable problem. I don’t think anyone has ever solved traffic.
In the original Sim City, I used to solve that problem by just not building roads in my cities. I just used to do trains all the way around my Sim Cities. No roads. Let the people complain. Better than them complaining about traffic all the time.
I played this for a bit today, and I might be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure the game design is such that at some point you will fail, and cause an end game. Like Tetris. At least, I’m not aware that any of the scenarios are “winnable”.
It does, but judging by high scores, I wasn’t even close to that point. The game becomes tedious for me far before that point. It will get to a point where I have a bunch of houses together, and getting them all hooked up without running out of roads is not fun. And then the map gets so jammed up it will put a house in an out of the way spot with no great path to it. Then you get a mess of freeways, no where near enough lights, etc.
In Mini Metro, I always felt like I could “just rebuild this line here, cross this line, and put in a bigger station and it will all work!” And I get that feeling with this game sometimes, I just can’t be bothered to try it because connecting up 50 hours isn’t fun.
It’s probably just not my kind of game, but I can still go back to Mini Metro and lose an hour of time.
Mini Metro is great, but it could also get really frustrating. Basically they are high score games like Tetris. I want to try this sometime.
Are there any changes to the Apple version?
The game gets a big thumbs up from me.
While I agree with @LeeAbe that Metro offers more flexibility to completely rebuild your network, I don’t mind too much as that often resulted in crazy do-overs to eek out just-a-few-more-points, extending the length of a game beyond what felt reasonable.
Motorways could do with some QoL enhancements:
- Better indication of houses/offices not connected (even a button you could press to temporarily highlight them)
- A button to temporarily hide motorways (when you have a complex junction underneath them)
- Something like Cities Skylines (maybe it was a mod) that lets you hover over a car and see the route it was taking
- When choosing your upgrades it would be nice to be able to swap back to the map to figure out what was needed most
In terms of gameplay I really want to understand what benefit traffic lights offer. They seem next to useless which reduces the number of tools at your disposal and makes the choice of upgrades pretty trivial.
Mini Motorways is definitely not as elegant as Mini Metro, but few games are.
I agree about traffic lights, and I happen to know that the team has struggled with making them effective in the game. One thing you will notice is that if there’s an intersection in the path of a vehicle, it will slow its speed long before approaching it. Long straightaways let cars go faster. Traffic lights let cars behave like they’re on straightaways, I believe, although at the cost of sometimes having to stop. I avoid them when playing too, so maybe they’re changed and I wasn’t aware of it. But from what I can tell, they still haven’t cracked it.