Welcome to my review of Mini Metro, a game where you design the metro systems below the city!
When I am not gaming or working my day job, I love to travel. I travel far and wide and mostly to my second home in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where my wife is from and a place I truly consider my second home. The thing that makes it so much better than my own home country Belgium? The MTR aka the metro system. Their system is beyond amazing and pretty much always on time.
As I love traveling, I can say I have been to other metro systems too, the Tube in London, the one in Tokyo and Osaka, even been to Paris and obviously Brussels too. But I never stood still to think how these metro railways were designed, let alone implemented. Enter Mini Metro and this is how the developers themselves describe the game:
In Mini Metro, you take on the task of designing the subway layout for a rapidly expanding city. Your city starts with three stations. Draw routes between these stations to connect them with subway lines. Commuters travel along your lines to get around the city as fast as they can. Each station can only hold a handful of waiting commuters so your subway network will need to be well-designed to avoid delays.
Eventually your network will fail. Stations will open too quickly. Commuters will crowd the platforms. How long the city keeps moving is up to you.
They hit the nail right on the head and this is the best way to describe this game. You pick one of the available cities from the options menu and you start building, nay, connecting stations with the touch screen (how I played it). As time progresses, you get more and more commuters and also stations to keep the flow of humans going.
Now the decision is yours, each time you get upgrades, which do you pick? What is most valuable, more commuters per train or extra trains? Maybe even another line? This is the main appeal of the game and at the same time its most evil invention. This game can be very evil, making a specific station more popular and so you need to suddenly coincide a second or third line with it, so you can do more with the commuters that are flooding it.
It does not stop there, do you decide to make the entire line a very long one or do you make it more of a circular shape and make it loop itself? All these decisions need to be made on the fly to keep the game going. But luckily, the game has some help here. It does show when a station is becoming saturated, it shows when you need to take action and it allows you to slow down time. Speed it back up to go faster to the next level of gameplay.
The longevity of this game is present throughout the choice of maps. The cities you can play, one has many rivers, the other just a few. Each time this is also something you need to care about! Do you have the resources to go below the river or do you just create another line next to it and then hook it up to another one? So many questions and it is now up to you to buy this game to play it!
Do you have what it takes to design a subway line?
In conclusion, this game is evil and addictive at the same time. You need to plan out your line almost every few minutes, it just does not stop. It gets a lot more challenging as you progress, but that is where the real fun is. I hit 600+ commuters on one of my first few games and I was just so proud I was able to keep going for that long. I loved it.
