Twenty real-world cities to design subways for (London, New York City, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Osaka, Saint Petersburg, Montréal, San Francisco, São Paulo, Seoul, Washington, D.C., Cairo, Istanbul, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Mumbai, and Auckland).Build your metro exactly how you want to with the all-new Creative mode.Three game modes: Normal for quick scored games, Endless for stress-free sandbox play, and Extreme for the ultimate challenge.It doesn't though, aye? You just gotta play it.

Compelling, constructive, hectic, relaxed gameplay.

How long the city keeps moving is up to you. The new assets you earn every week will help immensely - as long as they're used wisely.Įventually your network will fail. You'll be constantly redesigning your lines to maximise efficiency. The demands on your network are ever-increasing. 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. It's supply and demand, and I'm getting everything I want.In Mini Metro, you take on the task of designing the subway layout for a rapidly expanding city. This is something economists would no doubt be delighted to hear - to an economist everything is economics - but urban planning really is. You're an economist in these games, is what I'm not-so-subtly implying. but naturally, like with Motorways, the randomness of what station appears where, where people appear and what they want, is the challenge. Every line should ideally have access to every type of stop - circle, triangle, square, diamond, star, curvy diamond thingy, etc. In Metros it's diversification, egalitarianism. You want one big motorway going from all the blue houses to all the blue factories, if you can, with minimal interference from the greens who want to go somewhere else. In Motorways it's about specification, and division of labour. The limits here are the number of different lines.īut the real difference is strategy. Nowhere is a beginning or an end, for that reason - every station both origin and destination - and a Metro line can technically have infinite length, as opposed to the limited roads of Motorways. Rather than going from houses to offices or factories, the little people of this world appear as shapes at stations, which must get to other stations of the corresponding shape.

The concept is the same, just with lots of little, structural differences. or Tokyo, but the Euro-starkness of Metro is a fine replacement. If you're like me, you might have come to Mini Metro backwards, via the also-special Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club's follow-up urban planner that's been on Arcade for a little while already. Bringing it to the subscription service is a sign Apple gets it. It's what Apple Arcade is all about, selling mobile gaming as something more than a vehicle for toilet-break microtransactions (cleverclogs will tell you it always has been, if you knew where to look, but the volume of guff does make that old attitude forgivable). This is the mobile game, simple and clear and immaculately well-suited to the platform. This is why subway maps make for a perfect video game, and Mini Metro - now Mini Metro+, with a few enhancements made to it for its arrival on Apple Arcade - is the perfect example. Compared to every other kind of public transport map, a tube map is as simple to look at - but it has to have been made by a genius. You know the sort - made of wood, a bit tactile, and always passively educational, the kind designed by friendly faces in white coats that do want you to have fun, but also develop very specific parts of your brain while you're doing it. I look at London's tube map and see a kind of Scandi children's toy. Much of it is just in the looks: the minimalism and the weirdly playful colours. There's a special elegance to subway maps.

Mini metro browser