Video Game / Mini Motorways

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Similar to Metro, the player is tasked with constructing major roadways for many real-life cities. Houses and destination buildings appear over time, and the player must build connecting roadways to get cars of the correct color to each building. The map will expand over time and the player will accumulate resources to keep pace, including additional road tiles, traffic lights and roundabouts to manage traffic flow, bridges and tunnels to pass terrain, and high-speed motorways that pass over most other obstacles.

Playable cities, in order of unlock:

1. Los Angeles
2. Beijing
3. Tokyo
4. London
5. Mumbai
6. New York City
7. Dar es Salaam
8. Moscow
9. Munich
10. Zurich
11. Manila
12. Rio de Janeiro
13. Dubai
14. Mexico City
15. Wellington
16. Warsaw
17. Chiang Mai
18. Lisbon
19. Busan
20. Reykjavik
21. Vancouver
22. Cairns
23. Copenhagen
24. Hong Kong
25. Cape Town
26. İstanbul

Mini Motorways provides examples of the following tropes:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Just like the previous game, the realism of the city's infrastructure is misrepresented all for the Rule of Fun.
• Alliterative Title: Mini Motorways.
• Artistic License – Cars: All cars drive on the right side of the road, even in cities where left-hand traffic is the law^note Tokyo, Dar es Salaam, Wellington, Chiang Mai, Mumbai, London, Cairns, Hong Kong, and Cape Town.
• Automatic New Game: After the title screen the game takes you to a tutorial sequence and then you jump into your first city.
• Bilingual Bonus: All of the natural locations in each city are written in their respective countries' native languages.
• Colorblind Mode: The game has a colorblind option that lets you customize the building colors for better contrast.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Different buildings are colored based on their use as well as their occupancy. One of the game's main aspects is to build roadways so that traffic can easily move to and from buildings based on their activity.
• Critical Existence Failure: Your city shuts down and the game is over if one building can't get traffic flowing to it within a period of time.
• Endless Game: Like in Mini Metro, the game ends if a destination doesn't get enough visitors within the time limit, but you can continue playing in Endless Mode, where your score is determined by the rate at which cars visit destinations instead.
• Gimmick Level: Challenge Mode offers various modifiers to normal gameplay, ranging from busier or denser building placements, having more or less of particular resources, or additional obstacles like being unable to remove trees. Each city has its own set of challenges, in addition to rotating daily and weekly challenges where the modifiers are randomized.
• Holiday Mode: The Reykjavik Update added two festive frames in Photo Mode for Christmas.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The Hong Kong level introduces ports, where boats have a fixed route to and from them. You'd think you can build drawbridges across these routes so cars can still cross them, but no, you can't, because they're not drawbridges. You either need to build motorways over these routes or build your bridges somewhere else.
• Locomotive Level: London, Mumbai, New York City, and Copenhagen have train stations as additional destinations for cars. In these levels, a train moves along the railway, blocking cars along the way, and momentarily stops at each station. Trains cannot be removed, so further planning is needed in building roads that cross railways.
• Luck-Based Mission: Challenges where the upgrades are a mystery or only one is given every week can either make or break a run because they rely on luck to get the upgrades you want.
• Photo Mode: At the end of the level, you can take a picture of your final layout. You can also add a frame, the level's title, score, and modifiers, or even remove the destination markers.
• Pun: The challenge modifier where you can't destroy trees is called "Wood You Kindly".
• Real-Time with Pause: The game can be paused anytime to plan ahead and freely edit your placed road tiles and upgrades.
• Sandbox Mode: Creative Mode allows you to make custom maps of the locations you've unlocked by placing houses, destinations, and roads anywhere you want, with no pressure from traffic overload.
• Shout-Out:
  • Some of the achievements are pop-culture references:
    • The achievement for placing 666 road tiles across multiple runs is called "Highway to Hell".
    • Placing 25 traffic lights across multiple runs gets you the "Boogie Lights" achievement.
    • Using all nine motorways in one run rewards you with the "Mom's Spaghetti" achievement.
  • Two challenges reference The Fast and the Furious, with one of the Vancouver Challenges being called "Too Fast Two Bridges" and one of the Hong Kong Challenges being called "Fast but Furious".
• Troll Bridge: Referenced in the challenge modifier "Fear of Trolls", where you're not given any bridges but you start with one motorway.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Expert Mode is unlocked after reaching a certain score for each city. It presents harder challenges such as permanently placed road tiles like in Mini Metro and limited upgrades.