Mini Metro

The concept of mini metro is so simple that anyone can understand it in less time that it’ll take your next train to arrive. You drag metro lines between different types of stations, in order to allow passengers to move between them. If too many passengers are waiting, your stations overcrowd, ending the game. The process of organizing and rerouting your lines would be relentlessly addictive, but the polish of this app pushes it into a masterpiece. The rails must take into account water, and the water layouts correspond to real world cities - from Hong Kong to San Francisco to London and the developer’s home of Auckland (which apparently has no real metro) the theming is top notch. Even better is how the UI is expertly crafted to resemble a real metro map, full of colorful lines and simplified shapes. Friends watching me play have asked whether air was seeing some kind of real time map of their city. It’s surreal. For a casual gamer mini metro is unique in concept and fun. For the puzzle gamer it has depth and presents a gameplay mechanic unlike any other I’ve seen. Overall, a must have.

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I really don’t understand this developer. They have amazingly designed games that always suffer from terrible programming. They seem to have lazy programmers who do the bare minimum (while I’m sure make a Scotty-esque big deal out of it). They don’t even implement the most basic controls on “randomly” generated objects. When people complain about how bad it is, they put in an editor that allows you fix their mistakes, instead of them fixing them. It boggles the mind. Oh, and to use this ability to fix their poor programming, you have to play another game. I blame the management for this. Anyone can be fooled by people misrepresenting their credentials, especially early days in a company. But to not fix the situation after they’ve had games out as long as they have is simply dereliction of duty. They have released another game on the Arcade, and it is the same kind of nonsense: buildings appearing with no way to connect to them (or having to run ridiculous routes to do so), no checks on randomly generated objects, etc. You play these games for a while and say, “this is neat, it has potential”, and then the stupidity starts. After a while, you stop going back to it. I would say the same about the programmers, but it is obvious they have never played their own games ever. No programmer worth anything would play these games and not immediately start fixing all the basic faults that destroy the playability.

In the 1970s, the New York subway had a series of iconic and very famous route maps built on a simple, geometric, and stripped down aesthetic scheme designed by Michael Calcagno. This game takes what is essentially Calcagno’s design scheme and expands it into a worldwide mass transit rail system and management exercise. But trust me, you can play this game in a variety of ways: relaxing via “endless” and “creative” modes or with increasing difficulty challenges presented by each new map. Like the my review title suggests, I’ve been playing this game on a small iPhone screen, which presents something of a dexterity and precision learning curve that nonetheless ultimately does not detract from this game’s satisfaction. I’ve never played mini metro on an iPad but I’m sure it’s even more amazing.

I have been addicted to this app since I downloaded it. The aesthetics are wonderful and the feedback to touch is very well thought out. The concept is really cool and the fact that the maps are really cities makes it that much more enjoyable. However, having been playing it so much, I’ve found a couple frustrating things with the game play. The best part of the game is getting to design your own metro system and having to figure out what’s most efficient. When and where stations pop up seems too random and are arranged in no way like they would be in a city (denser in the middle, less dense around the peripheries). Likewise, it makes sense for more and more stations to pop up quickly in the beginning, but for stations to continue popping up at the same rate once the system is pretty big makes no sense and takes the fun out of it. A logic problem gets turned into a random scramble. This game desperately needs other game modes, especially with the price it’s asking, but it has tons of potential.

I love this game. It’s calming, addictive, challenging, and fulfills the childlike wonder of managing trains. Would highly recommend picking it up. That said, this game mode needs a mode between normal and endless. I like playing endless for the sake of just building infrastructure upon infrastructure, but I enjoy the challenge of keeping stations from becoming to populated. If either: 1) endless mode could still show which stations are becoming overall populated, but no end game state when the do, or 2) we could get a mode that brings consequence to the player that doesn’t incorporate a complete restart. Perhaps a happiness meter that declines as stations overcrowd, perhaps you’re next upgrade gets delayed, or maybe people start to leave your subway system, something of that sort. I’d like to keep working on my project with risk involved without absolutely restarting the game.