All aboard for zen and the art of subway design.
All of us at Dinosaur Polo Club and Radial Games are very excited to be bringing Mini Metro to PlayStation 4! Now you too can design subway systems from the comfort of your couch.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Designing a metro map? Surely this is someone’s job? But haven’t you ever, while waiting for a bus or a train, though you could organize things better? Here’s your chance.
It starts simply — a handful of stations, some passengers wanting to move between them, and you have to draw the lines to set the whole thing in motion. Trains travel the lines and passengers hop on and off automatically to get to where they need to go. So far so good.
Then a few more stations pop up. You have to extend your lines so now the trains take that little bit longer to make a return trip. You can edit your lines at any time so you can experiment with different layouts. Maybe one long loop with a few other smaller connecting lines? Or three intersecting lines so people can make easy transfers.
And don’t worry, help is on the way! At the end of every week you get an extra train and another upgrade — maybe it’s another line, or a carriage, or some tunnels. Hopefully this is enough to get you through another seven days! The game ends if you have too many passengers waiting at a station for too long, so tweak your network and use those upgrades wisely to keep your city moving.
We’ve got 20 real-world cities that you can design, such as London, Paris, Mumbai, and Shanghai, each one with a unique graphical style and gameplay challenges. Plus four gameplay modes to explore, a daily challenge, unlockable vintage maps, oh my!
Here are a few tips to get you started:
- As more passengers make use of your network over time, you might need to reassign trains to new routes to manage the demand.
- Plan ahead for the upgrades you might get at the end of the week. Maybe you can afford to let that station overcrowd for a while longer?
- Don’t be afraid to pause time and remove entire lines in your network. This will allow you to use the regained line elsewhere, creating a more efficient network.
- Each map has unique geography, requiring a different approach in each new city. What works in Berlin doesn’t necessarily work in Osaka!
- Each map has a huge amount of replay value, with randomly generated train stations every play session.
So what are you waiting for? Jump in, pick a city, and start playing with trains.
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