More transport-themed madness comes to Apple Arcade and Switch to celebrate Dinosaur Polo Club’s tenth anniversary in the shape of the Miniversary update. Both Mini Metro and Mini Motorways get some new content for us to drive into.
Dinosaur Polo Club made a splash with its minimalist strategy traffic and train management sims, picking up more than four million players across Switch, mobile, and PC versions. Now, to ring in its tenth birthday, it created the Miniversary event bringing maps picked by fans, new destinations, and plenty of addictive administration to our fingertips.
Though the games have both been out for a while, if you’ve missed them, here’s a quick introduction to the Miniverse. Mini Metro places you in charge of cities’ metro, tram, tube, subway – whatever you want to call it – systems. You get new carriages and trains to add to lines, along with tunnels, interchanges, and other fun things to ease the strain at overflowing stations. Connect square, triangle, circle, and plenty of other shaped stations to allow travelers to reach their destinations by dragging new lines between them.
Mini Motorways is Dinosaur Polo Club’s second miniature management game, and since its release in 2019, players all over the world have become city planners by connecting destinations with roads and motorways, using traffic lights, roundabouts, and much more to quell the road rage from backed-up commuters.
Both Metro and Motorways provide a relaxing experience but pose challenges as more of your population chooses to use your transport systems. There are always endless and creative modes if you want a building experience without the looming threat of overcrowding.
The tenth-anniversary update brings six new maps – three each for Motorways and Metro – consisting of London, Mumbai, and New York City, then Warsaw, Lisbon, and Tokyo respectively. No pressure, only some of the biggest and busiest cities in the world to coordinate, right?
New York won the player vote to become a map in Motorways after it solidified itself as a staple in Metro. You may notice something about this and the other new maps in Motorways – there are train lines on them and a new train station destination for your commuters to park up at. This is a new feature brought in to celebrate the success and longevity of both games and give them a little link together.
I very much enjoy trying my hand at planning London’s roads – though it takes me a few tries to properly figure out which boroughs really need those roundabouts, and I sincerely apologize to the entirety of Tokyo for the farcical subway map I drew for them in Mini Metros. I really do enjoy these games, but perhaps I should stay at my journalism job and not move to being a city planner any time soon.
The two games are excellent timesinks whether you’re on a commute, at your PC for a long session, or chilling out on the sofa. The relaxing, minimal graphics and soundtrack work wonders to bring down your blood pressure as stations fill up with passengers wanting to get to stations on the other side of the map, and the new cities add even more challenges across the world.
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