meditative fun & challenging

Oddly calming, even as the game progresses and gets presumably more stressful. Succeeds in its minimalism to the highest order.

Simple and short. Great if you have ADHD and hate meetings but still need to listen.

Will grant you a new appreciation for Civil Engineering and Transport Systems, especially in Hong Kong.

Just thumbs up.

Good

haha metro go brrrrr!

getting hit by train simulator

Very chill and enjoyable game. Simple but addictive.

An excellent minimalist game that initially looked like it might not be going anywhere in terms of playability, then turns out to be a game with a myriad of possibilities that are quite easy to get hooked on.

The game is essentially centred upon an abstract map colour coded in the familiar metro-style colour palette. Familiarity with this kind of map is what made the game somewhat alluring to me in the first place, yet the choice of dour colours made it look a little bit melancholic and off putting. It might have been nice to have some more ambient and neon-like colour themes available as optional choices.

The gist of the game is to watch out for stations randomly appearing on the map and link them together with scrupulously positioned train routes. Once stations appear on the map then they start gaining passengers. Build train routes that link stations together, and the game will deploy a train on the route, which collects the queued passengers to avoid congesting stations. Once any one station has overfilled with passengers, the game is over. You usually start with a given few stations and a small inventory of train stock to start with. As the simulated weeks progress then you become entitled to new trains and other stock items. All you need do is watch and interactively respond to the developments on the map and all calculations are done in the background.

THE GREATEST THING ABOUT THE GAME IS THAT THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MONEY INVOLVED!!!!! You are perfectly entitled to build as many route connections as you like. It is totally a creative puzzle and an abstract real-time simulation with no build costs, although your inventory of stock does limit what you can work with in any one week. Loved it. GLORIOUS FREEDOM! Complete chill game! No calculations involved.

Mini Metro hides the tutorial and guide in the options menu which I found to be kind of puzzling as that seemed an odd place for any kind of tutorial. Anyway, the game does not need much tutorial as the mechanism is kind of obvious. However knowing how to edit tracks is almost essential to bring congestion-free order to the network of randomly appearing stations. And full explanation of this is only in the guide and is not completely explained in the tutorial.

Once you work out how to modify tracks on a route, Mini Metro starts becoming a cruise to play. The interactive edits were a complete joy as they worked flawlessly in real-time. I loved seeing the map update and change to my modifications and then watch the trains adapt to the new route layout. I could even change or delete a track segments while a train was still on that segment! Flawlessly. The train would only adapt to the new route once the modified stage had been cleared and updated, and this all happened automatically and all transitions were calculated by the game and executed smoothly and effortlessly.

One thing I did notice was that I couldn't delete or move trains and carriages. Once they were deployed on a route, they couldn't be moved without ripping up the entire route and thereby making the train stock available again. It would have been nice to have that option as that could have saved me from loosing the game on a few occasions. Still, Mini Metro remains very playable as it stands. 9.5/10