Mini Metro 4+

Mini Metro is the only game I bought on the Mac. It is played on real maps that resembles cities around the world. In the game, you are responsible for the construction of the cities’ metro system. Starting off with a few stations, you have to carefully plan out how they would connect to each other. And before you know it, you are frantically moving carriages and rebuilding lines as your stations become full while new stations randomly appear. It was addictive at first and as time goes on, you would still enjoy it every now and then.

Dinosaur Polo Club is quick to respond to my questions with helpful answers. There are also frequent updates with new maps and features. In short, if you are interested in city simulation games and mimalistic design, then get Mini Metro.

I bought this game two days ago and I’ve been playing it in every spare moment since. The visual design is simple, elegant, beautiful; the sound and music are soothing; and the gameplay is of the best kind: a few simple rules that give rise to fascinating complexity. It starts off easy and then the difficulty curve ramps up in just the right way. This game boils down the essence of what makes games like Simcity or Yoot tower so fascinating, that challenge of managing limited resources in a dynamic situation to create a growing system. It’s the distilled essence of all sim games.

You start off with half a dozen maps and unlock more as you play. There is no pay-to-play or microtransaction content. There is no violence; the game is 100% kid friendly although given the abstraction and challenge involved it’s probably better for tweens and up. There is an “endless” mode that lets you play with no possibility of faillure so that you can experiment with different strategies or just let the thing run like an ant farm. There is also a hard mode in which tracks are permanent once put down. You can view statistics about your game in progress by pausing the game and then hitting the escape key, which takes you to an in-game pause menu; from there you have three buttons in the bottom-right corner of the screen that take you to statistics, record, or screen snapshot functions.

On a minor note, it’s not possible to tab-switch to other application from the game while in full screen mode. But you can run the game in a windowed mode, and it runs just fine that way on my four-year-old laptop.

Overall this is a must-have for anyone who likes sim games and highly recommended overall.

UPDATE: Two years later, I’m still playing the game from time to time. Actually right now I’m going through a phase of being fascinated with it all over again. Over the past two years, they have added new maps, and the maps really do have surprisingly different dynamics. I’ve got 2,000 points on some and can’t get more than 600 on others. So there’s a lot of depth to this game.

Un jeu intelligent, élégant et qui fait cogiter. Très zen, idéal pour décompresser après une longue journée.