I think this game needs some time to polish some irritating rough edges. Here's a vague categorisation:

Pacing:

- I think the constant "new segments every 30 seconds" makes the very early game too slow; I have the habit of placing the beginning four road pieces and skipping to next morning.
- When you have a network that needs major reworking, even if you pause instantly, it can take the whole two-minute game over timer for the existing backlog to clear. I get that having the backlog clear instantly when the road is removed would be exploitable, but it can make it feel like the game over timer simply appearing kills a game.
- Because spawning segments is disabled when there are road problems, it often feels like one puts themself in a corner where they need to spawn segments to unlock more highway/road tiles to fix the road network.

Tutorial:

- It's unclear what the legal road/highway connection possibilities are, and you have to figure it out by trial and error.
- The loading screen hints talk about roundabouts, but the way to construct them is difficult to figure out.

User Interface:

- You might think that clicking on the road/highway/magic light at the top switches you into the appropriate build mode. It does not.
- It'd be nice if there was a button to hold to quickly switch to "remove road" when one makes a mistake.
- If you build a curve which assumes the vehicles drive on the left, you get "curve too steep" rather than something explaining that the curve is on the wrong side for that direction.
- The UI gets very confused if you try to build roads over a cliff and then try to work backwards to undo it.

It has a lot of potential as a puzzle game, trying to balance limited roads with ever increasing traffic. If you like road management in cities skylines, this is the game for you. However, I cannot recommend it. The controls are, in a word, jank. Trying to make multi way intersections, place highways, or even deleting road sections is an exercise in frustration. You look at pictures, you see it work, you GET it to work in one section, but you cant replicate it in another section, despite using the same mouse movements. It goes from challenging to outright frustrating very quickly.

The tutorial is quite unhelpful. It's 5 lines of text. On highways, it says "highways are hard to build, but you'll figure it out"....that is NOT a tutorial! That's a terrible tooltip from some janky youtube review. The game shows you screenshots of highways, and from that you are supposed to figure out that A) roads and highways have totally different rules for connections, can only interconnect on certain angles, said angles are determined on things like the angle of the road and where it is in the hex, not just road position, ece, and B) there are LOTS of different intersections and flow management setups. No we will not tell you how to build them nor how well they will work. No, we wont show you how to control the jank physics of roads. And given the actual angle of the road is a MAJOR important factor in getting intersections to work, you now see how this becomes hair-pullingly annoying very quickly.

The map selection is also rather disappointing. I thought there were random maps, or maybe a set of maps generated with different themes, but no, they are pre made. Which is fine, but with only 3 to choose from it quickly limits replay-ability, once you get a road setup that works for you you're basically done with a map.

There's other minor annoyances. Like, using the bulldozer requires you to drag, but doesnt make it clear what roads you will be destroying. Any built up area this is a major exercise in frustration. Also, highways cannot overwrite roads, but roads CAN overwrite highways, but not always. Sometimes you'll finally get a road to make an intersection with a roundabout only to find that said roundabout now doesnt use highways but regular roads. Now use the bulldozer, delete those roads, oh now you deleted a different road right next to it, now you'll need to relay that and fight to get the geometry correct, ece. Ugh.

I think this one needs more time in the oven, because there is a great gameplay loop here. Hopefully the dev can fix the road placement controls. At $10 IDK if i'll bother refunding or just wait it out. We'll see.

This is a fun game, I played a lot of the demo. Takes a bit of time to figure the roads out, but once you do it's very fun. I think the price is a bit high for what it is in its current state though, but if it gets more updates and new features definitely worth it.

Game looks nice and simple and satisfying. Gives vibes of a traffic game like mini motorways. However the traffic management is TOO simplistic. You don't have enough tools to control the traffic correctly and the cars drive either extremely cautiously and sometimes vehicles won't clear our of a traffic jam despite there being no obstructions in front of them or drive like someone cut their break lines, approaching traffic jams at 400MPH and plowing straight through anyone and anything that gets in their way.

Then there is the traffic density problem. You can only have two-lane roads. Every road spawns districts and every district spawns cars. It looks like any car can spawn at any district and have a destination to any other district. This means that your cities can reach a critical mass where once there is enough districts there is no longer enough space on the roads for all of the cars. It isn't a matter of road or district layout. These things help delay that problem, but inevitably your roads just get too full because too many vehicles want to drive clear across the island for no reason and just spend too much time on the road. The last round I failed out on due to "traffic jams" despite the fact that I had no stopped vehicles anywhere on the map. My roads were simply too full and the cars were driving too slowly. I had "traffic jams" on straightaways where vehicles were moving and not at intersections or pileups.

Lastly there is currently no real point or objectives in the game. There is no map unlock or story progression or tech tree or campaign or anything to work for. There also doesn't appear to be any indication on how to beat or win at any particular map even if you cover most of the island in districts. Every map is doomed to fail. Even then that could be an okay style of "survival" gameplay but there is no leaderboards to gauge or compare your success.

All of this would be acceptable if the game was in "Early Access" and they planned to add more to the game as they went, but I don't buy early access games anymore for this reason. This game still feels like an incomplete early access game even if you consider its relatively low price ($12.99 CAD at the time of this posting). It needs more. More road types, more ways to win or progress at the game. Maybe something competitive, even if its only to compete with yourself.

It's good!!

I like the resource management; not a fan of the 'lose the game' countdown

would be nice to be able to see where cars are trying to go when they can't find a route

This is a cool little relaxed chill game (from what I've played of it) it will be a go to when I'm recovering from a 'decent weekend' of frolics with my community. It's really simple to understand, but still has a challenge on it. I just wish there were a few things like, if you click on the level to play, the map showed you what it was going to be looking like, and the first time I played it, I didn't know there was no auto-save, so loading it back in, I couldn't continue from a 'load game' [although I think the load screen should say there are no loads available?] I think a few little quality of life things would be cool. As this has only just been released I think the developer probably would read/listen to feedback and maybe implement were it was possible. Definitely my type of relaxed game. A game I can just drop into play, play for a little bit and come back to (now I know about the manual save).

A very cozy traffic game! Runs well and has a nice vibe to it.

Man, I really wanted to be able to recommend this one. There are elements here that I enjoy such as the charming, calming aesthetics (reminds me of Islanders) and I like the random elements to the maps. It's very fun in the beginning but then quickly starts to go downhill.

There are several problems that are cutting short my play session though which, if resolved, would probably keep me coming back to this game for hours and hours, so I feel like there is a worthy game to continue building off of should the developer decide to keep updating:
-this game is very difficult. I only ever played on easy difficulty and I felt like my city was crashing and burning in a matter of minutes and not getting close to populating even a quarter of the build area
-I want more tools for diagnosing the problems. It seems there are some correlations with the farms areas not causing a ton of traffic but the houses/cities are, but that's just by observation. Maybe some stats on what the tiles actually do once they are on the map would be helpful. or figuring out where trips from that tile want to go
-it's also difficult that development sprouts up wherever a road is, there isn't any way to just build a road without adding more development (aka traffic problems)
-the highways are pretty dang frustrating. There are several things that should be improved here to make them easier to build, and maybe even providing some use cases on how to do it. Once I did figure out that the main use case is roundabouts, then understanding that I really needed to build them counter-clockwise was the only way to really utilize them. The other issue is it seems like you really don't get enough highway pieces to actually use them. idk, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but this needs to be fixed
-the game has a calm aesthetic, but the problem sound announcement really stresses me out. I start out just enjoying my little tiny town and then very quickly it turns into a disaster. At least let me just enjoy it if I'm on the easy setting
-I think there is a bug when deleting roads where you lose the magic lights completely. I was trying to redo my layout and I don't know where all my magic lights disappeared to. I thought I had lots

Seems like there would also be opportunities to add different little features, like plopping intersection types, allowing over/underpasses...

Overall, it was fun for a bit, but I think improvements are needed, otherwise I think I'll just keep getting frustrated with it.

The game loop is solid; however, I expected much more tools from a transport department game. Are there seriously no traffic lights? No traffic signs? And what the hell is this "magic" that disabled hitboxes in a particular tile?

The highways are poorly implemented. The tutorial says, "It's tricky, but you will figure it out"? I tried for 15 minutes, but I must be dumb because I don't understand how they work.

This game does not feel like a traffic management game.

runs well on linux. Fun little game. Surprised there was no resolution/scaling options in the video settings, but it seemed fine with whatever defaults it assumed.