

More stations are opening, and commuters are appearing faster. Each station can only hold a handful of waiting commuters so your subway network will need to be well-designed to avoid delays. Commuters travel along your lines to get around the city as fast as they can. Draw routes between these stations to connect them with subway lines. If anything, thinking like that might engender more sympathy for city planners and transit authorities around the world.In Mini Metro, you take on the task of designing the subway layout for a rapidly expanding city.

The random nature of where the shapes pop up and when you’re offered extras like tunnels and interchanges (which allow you to fit more people in a station) can be frustrating, but if you want to get nerdy and granular about it, you can just pretend that the political realities of your city make it impossible to build a new tunnel every time you want to. As you play, you might find yourself lost on a single level for a half hour at a time, and feed even more time will slip by if you get particularly engaged playing a level on Endless mode.
#London mini metro how to
The game’s simple design pops with color, especially if you can get seven lines up and running, and the stress of figuring out how to connect a shape that popped up in a remote corner of the map to your existing system is balanced by the fact that it can be relaxing to get a moment to watch a huge system you built ferry people all over a city. Is it fun? There’s definitely an appeal, both for the transit nerd someone just looking to kill some time with a relaxed, low-stakes game. And as long as you stay connected to the internet, there are daily challenges that the game will give you, allowing you to test your system building prowess against other builders around the world. There are also a number of achievements you can try to unlock, challenging you to do seemingly impossible things like run the London level with only one tunnel or moving 1600 passengers around Montreal using only four lines. For the truly dedicated or those looking for an immense challenge, there’s “Extreme” mode, which doesn’t allow you to modify your lines once you lay them down. Stations don’t overcrowd in Endless mode, and success is instead measured in “efficiency,” which is defined as the amount of passengers delivered over a week divided by 7. After scoring high enough to unlock a city, you can always go back and play previous cities again in the normal mode, or play around in “Endless” mode, which is more of a sandbox that allows for low stakes experimentation.

That random nature of each level also makes sure the game has plenty of replay value. The stats ultimately don’t count for much, but they’re fun to look at after a good round.

#London mini metro full
If the circle reaches the completion with the station still full of people, that’s that.Īfter a round is over, you can snap a picture of the final state of your transit system, watch a video of it all happening and check out stats that break down things like the total population of your city, the amount of angry passengers you had stewing while waiting for a train, your system’s capacity at the end and the amount of track you laid down. You’re alerted to this first by the sight of shapes jumping around agitatedly at a crowded station, and if they aren’t picked up, a countdown circle begins at the station. The game ends when any station in your system becomes too overcrowded. As more and more days go by, your system becomes more chaotic, with lines crossing all over the map, and it’s up to you to make sure that lines aren’t so long that stations are left to just gather more and more people waiting for a train. Usually you have the option to add another line (up to 6 or 7, depending on the system), but you’ll also have to choose between that and something like adding an extra train carriage or locomotive to a line with a high population or getting yourself a new tunnel. Do you save your extra lines and try to run just a couple really long ones with multiple trains? How many of your limited amount of tunnels should you use to get to those stations on another side of the river? How do you solve the problem of a particular station becoming the drop off point for just one kind of shape when that shape is only on one line? You can either struggle with these questions live, as the system runs, or you can pause to consider things more slowly, while still moving lines around.Īt the end of every “week” that you’ve kept a system running, the game will pause and allow you to pick upgrades for your system. Things start slow and calm, but soon randomly generated shapes start popping up in other places on the map, forcing you into making important decisions. Your score, which is used to unlock new cities, is determined by how many people are able to ride your trains and get dropped off at the correct station.
