Mini Metro from Dinosaur Polo Club is a fun little puzzle game that teaches you how to manage a subway network. The goal is to deliver passengers to their destinations quickly and efficiently.
You can play the game either in a randomly generated city or one based on a real world location. Each of these has its own quirks that will test your planning skills.
Gameplay
Mini Metro is a puzzle strategy game that challenges players to build an efficient rail transit network for an ever-growing city. Its visual style mimics that of modern transit maps, with players connecting station nodes to create transport routes.
Its simplistic visual style and calm music makes it a relaxing game that’s easy to dip your toe into, gently increasing the challenge with daily challenges and different cities.
Moreover, the gameplay is extremely intuitive for touchscreen devices. Adding new lines and placing extra trains or train cars is as simple as tapping and dragging from station to station.
In addition to constructing metro lines, players are also given choices each week to upgrade their system with extra trains, train cars, bridges, or other items like interchanges that help increase the capacity of stations. This is where the real strategy comes in, and a lot of the fun lies.
Graphics
Mini Metro is a game about designing the subway layout of a rapidly growing city. You start with three stations and draw routes between them to connect them with subway lines that commuters travel along to get around the city as quickly as possible.
Every station can only hold a limited number of waiting commuters so you’ll need to be constantly redesigning your network to keep up with demand. There are also upgrades available that can help you to keep your transit system running smoothly for longer.
The game’s graphics are simple, yet effective. The different coloured lines that criss-cross the screen are a great way to highlight what’s happening on the map and it’s really satisfying to pinch your finger to zoom in or out when the map starts to get really big.
Sound
Mini Metro is a puzzle strategy game that takes you to over two dozen real-world cities. You’re tasked with building and operating a transportation network to help keep commuters moving through your city.
The game makes use of a procedural audio system to generate sounds that take inspiration from minimal music and the metro lines you draw between stations. The system generates sounds with a variety of granularity and a wide range of musical parameters.
The sound effects are a nice little touch, but what really made the game stand out for me was the minimalist style used to represent each station and train. It’s a great way to communicate what you’re doing without making the game too complicated or overwhelming, and it adds a lot to the experience of designing a metro.
Endless mode
Mini Metro is a game that’s a bit like the old puzzle games you used to play as a kid, but instead of just solving a random puzzle on a board, you’re trying to build a subway network. You start with three stations, represented by circles, squares and triangles, and you need to connect them so that passengers can get to their destinations.
As time goes on, new stations pop up with different passenger demands, and those need to be taken care of too. Your metro system gets more complicated as you add train cars and train carriages, bridges and tunnels to take your trains across rivers, and interchange stations so that you can transfer passengers between lines.
There’s a few game modes in Mini Metro, including Endless mode which lets you play as long as you want. This is a very relaxing way to spend some time, and you can even choose to play in night mode or colourblind mode so you don’t wake up your partner.
Timed mode
Mini Metro is a game about designing a subway network for a growing city. It’s a simple concept: draw lines between stations and start trains running, but as more stations open up, your network will need to be revised frequently.
While you can easily get sucked in by Mini Metro’s simple mechanics, it’s also easy to get stuck. Thankfully, there are some gameplay elements that keep the experience from getting too stale.
One of the most fun parts about Mini Metro is redrawing the lines that connect stations. Using the touch interface, simply slide your finger across the screen to drag out new routes. You can even pinch to zoom in or out when the map gets too big, which adds an extra level of realism.