Recent reviews by elidoran

Beautiful artwork. Great gameplay mechanics. Variety of equipment and play styles. High replay value. If they made more Mark of the Ninja games, I'd buy them.

Fun. Beautiful. Innovative.
I love how it shows you what you need to know in an intuitive way as you start new areas where you'll need the new knowledge.
Great game.

I want to love this game as much as Mini Metro, but, I just can't.

The short version: this game's AI turns any choice you make into a bad choice, and then makes it worse by not providing an opportunity to make up for it.

The long version:

if you choose a bridge instead of a motorway, then it'll start spawning houses way away from its matching color stores so you will desperately need a motorway. And, those houses will not be across water for you to make use of your new bridge. Then, it won't give you the option to choose a motorway for multiple weeks after that.

Or, if you choose a roudabout instead of a bridge, it'll start placing stuff across the water, sometimes across two bodies of water so you're desperate for bridges. And, it won't offer a bridge for multiple weeks.

Or, you choose a motorway cuz you've learned you must always choose a motorway when it's offered or they will make you regret it, so they'll start dropping houses/stores where you'd have put a roundabout if you had one so now you can't ever put a roundabout there and traffic will be awful. (Also, it loves to place stores so their entrances are one tile from another store's entrance which leaves you with no options for making that traffic better, ever).

I think their original idea was to have the game press the player's weak spots to keep the pressure on. What happened instead, is the game seems sadistic. You have to try to place road tiles to prevent the game from putting stuff in ridiculous places. And, place roundabouts ahead of time before it _prevents_you_ from ever putting one where it'll be needed. When you use extra road tiles defensively against the AI, then the AI starts putting stuff far out so you have to delete the extra road tiles so you can connect the stuff it keeps adding farther and farther out (you often get 10 or 20 new road tiles a week, so, when it drops 3 houses in different spots and each requires several road tiles to connect, then it's being just plain nasty). Once you delete those extra road tiles, it _immediately_ will drop the ridiculous stuff where those tiles were deleted. So, it forces you to delete your defense, then attacks there.

As if its demonic placement strategy wasn't enough, it also doesn't consider whether the stuff it places is viable. It'll drop a house where it's impossible to connect it to a road, ever. Then have stores demand those cars as if that isolated house is actually usable. Today is a Daily Challenge which only gives more road tiles, no upgrades, ever, and you start with 2 bridges. Then, it places stuff on three different land masses in a way it requires 3 bridges to connect them all. It should avoid making those kinds of mistakes (this one was probably because it thought it was possible to connect two separate areas on the third land mass, but, it was impossible, because a store in its middle spanned the full width of the land mass, blocking one side from the other.)

Also, it carries over some patterns from Mini Metro which _do_not_ work in this game.

Such as, moving a road/bridge/motorway doesn't work like you think it would based on Mini Metro. In Mini Metro, a change to the path can be done any time any length, and, any trains currently on the old path will continue on it and once they're off, the old path vanishes. And, any new trains will automatically start using the new path, immediately, even if there are trains on the old path. That does not work well in Mini Motorways, at all, because making new paths is limited by how many road tiles (or bridges, or motorways, or roundabouts) you have. If you have extra, you can make the new path and it'll have the old path disappear, yay. When you don't have extra, and most of the time you won't (see explanation of vicious AI behavior above), it isn't just the little bit of old path you wait on... you have to wait for all the cars which left their houses planning to use that path to travel all the way to their destination *and back*. And, to make that worse, you can't place the new path until the last of those cars has traveled back across the deleted path to free up the road/bridge/etc. So, you have to wait to place the new path, which means during that time there IS NO PATH. So, no new cars can head out to use the new path which you're not allowed to place yet. See how different that is from Mini Metro? Yikes. It's not like they even leave the houses and drive as close as they can. They literally do not leave the houses until the full path exists.

It gets worse. Consider how this pathing issue affects the abusive AI's decisions. Once it sees you're waiting for a path to delete so you can place a new one, it starts attacking that situation as the easiest way to end you.

So, what would fix these issues:

1. ensure all AI placed items are viable. it must be possible to use them at some point. Example, one game put a house behind other houses which formed a blockade, and it was next to the water, but, houses can't connect directly to a bridge. So, there's no way to ever use that house.

2. have the AI place some stuff which plays into the choices the players make so there is some benefit to balance out the crazy mean stuff.

3. when deleting some part of a path, allow placing a new path in a "to be used when the old path vanishes, and built with the old path's resources" state. That way, the player can tell the game where it wants the new path without waiting until minutes later, and, cars can be sent out to use the new path, even if they'd have to sit and wait for it a bit for it to be completed. Also, this would allow for the possibility that the new path can be placed immediately and the old path deleted immediately, which already happens if you have the extra tiles, and it would now happen if the number of new path tiles was equal to or less than the number of to-be-deleted tiles. That probably sounds confusing, but, it's basically what happens already if you want to delete 5 road tiles and place 5 new road tiles then there are two scenarios for that. The first is if you have 5 extra road tiles, then you can do it right away and the 5 old road tiles will immediately vanish and become available for you to use somewhere else. The second is if you do *not* have 5 extra road tiles, then it won't let you do anything so you have to wait for the last of all the cars to drive _back_ across those yet-to-be-deleted road tiles before you get those 5 road tiles back to place in the new path. And, if it would let you place 5 road tiles for the new path it would see that would be viable and it could immediately delete the old path and use the new path.

I hope this game improves over time with more modes, better mechanics, and a smarter AI. And, I hope they make more games because Mini Metro is great and both games are beautiful games with wonderful ideas.

Edited to add: Eventually, they changed the game so putting down road tiles to defend against the AI won't work because the AI is now allowed to drop stuff right on top of those defensive road tiles.

This is not a game. It's a sad little story we are duped into stepping thru, slowly, and painfully.

Very short gametime.
Every set of rocks to climb look exactly the same.
Vast majority of terrain is impassible to ensure completely controlled linear play.
Game mechanics are very awkward.
A sad and depressing story = not for entertainment.