Developer Dinosaur Polo Club is releasing a major new update for their traffic management sim. The Mini Motorways’ Challenge City update will make you hate big city traffic even more but in the best way possible.
The update is adding challenges for each city, and it comes on the heels of the Hometown update, which added another new location to the list: Wellington, New Zealand. That makes 12 cities in total where you’ll need to plan on the fly to eliminate — or just pray you can contain — the wild amount of traffic these huge cities generate on a regular basis.
Try as you might, your clean, well-placed roadways can turn into a chaotic mess as you attempt to take on these new challenges. The very first one tasks players with managing Los Angeles traffic while only using one highway. That’s insane. And it’s exactly how you get chaotic infrastructure that looks like this:
Each challenge provides up to three modifiers that can either help or hinder your traffic management plans. The Highway to Hollywood challenge mentioned above only provides one highway for all of LA, but it also doubles the number of traffic lights awarded at the end of each week, which helps manage the city in a completely different way.
The same line of thinking goes for the Dubai Wild Card challenge, which starts you off with one of each upgrade, allows houses to appear anywhere on the map, and makes weekly choices for upgrades a complete mystery. It’s maddening, but a welcome update to the level all the same.
Having to abide by specific rules on each map breathes new life into the game by making players approach infrastructure management in outside-the-box ways.
Every city has been given up to three new challenges that force you to play in ways that promote creativity while creating just the right amount of stress. Not enough to cause rage quits, but just enough to make you feel like your score could’ve been a little higher if slightly different decisions were made.
No matter how stressful the city management gets, that stress has the potential to turn into peace and calm when everything starts to click. When you can manually speed up the pace of the game without causing yourself to panic, you’re doing a great job.
It’s a wonderful feeling that only gets enhanced by the update, as the obstacles presented are just a bit tougher than the ones you’re used to when playing Mini Motorways. And having a city layout that actually looks visually pleasing is more of an added bonus when taking on these new tasks. The roads will usually start to look crazy in no time.
The Mini Motorways’ Challenge City update adds even more replayability to a game that can already make you feel like you need to try over and over to beat high scores on the worldwide leaderboard. And it’s perfect for those who may have put the game down after playing each city level just once or twice.
At the time of writing, the update is “coming soon” so there’s no set release date just yet.
Mini Motorways is out now on PC via Steam and iOS via Apple Arcade, with plans to come to the Nintendo Switch in nearly 2022. If you’re looking to read more about the game before deciding whether or not to pick it up, you check out our review for it right here.
