MiniTrans

This is really disappointing. On the surface, this looks like a laid-back puzzle game in the style of Mini Metro, but in practice it plays like a sandbox or a desktop toy right up until a screen pops up to say you've lost. As far as I can tell, what you're supposed to do in Level mode is put down city tiles and connect them with roads or train lines to make a certain amount of money before time runs out, but there's no explanation of what arrangement of tiles will actually make any money and no time to experiment before the end of the round. There's also Infinite mode which gives you a ton of money up front, and takes away the timer, so you can just watch your trains go back and forth with no actual objectives? Story mode and Free-draw mode are "in development", as are half the cities on the main menu. Sound settings are not preserved between launches of the game, and those are the only settings you get. A complete waste of time.

This game caught my eye because of it's looks - on the first glance, it seems like something similar to mini-metro or dorfromantik - the sort of chill causal puzzle game and I'm sure that's what the developer went for, but it's basically unplayable. Out of all the areas, only one seems to be unlocked and in that area only two modes - this is on a supposedly finished game ( spoilers it is not finished ). This game has many bugs - they are not necessarily gamebreaking, but they are annoying - for example, the settings, especially for volume get reset every time you close the game, so enjoy the music blaring into your headphones every time you open this, also the ,,save file'' pops up every time you restart or start a new game untill you say ,,no'' by which point it never pops up again untill you save another game - so if you say wanted to play on another save file and continue some other later, tough luck, you can't. Third and the most obvious problem is, the game rules are completely unclear - it's very clear that you are ment to connect two or more cities together by roads, railroads and such, but it's absolutely unclear what the conditions are. The game starts you with a 60 second timer with a ,,freebuild time'' - which is never explained, so you build something up and connect it and than you wait to see if the line of what you have to earn ( ? ) reached the goal. Issue is, there is nothing to tell you what to do, there is an ,,instructions tab'' hidden in the settings, which tels you some basic information, on the level of ,,this is the city statistics bar, it shows city statistics'' but it never explains what any of them mean or do. You are left stranded to guess what you should do - should you build two cities ? three cities ? four ? - I don't know, the game never tells you, I don't know what they do, I don't know how much they produce, I don't know how much a train makes per trip or how much a car does, there is basically no way to estimate anything. I don't know if I should build roads first, or if it's good to build railways too, or if harbors are usefull at the start - there is no information about anything. On top of that, I somehow got stuck in a loop of starting a new game, immediatelly into a 60 second timer to meet a goal, with the budget of 500 cash, and never being able to meet the quota. This game is unplayable, I'm sorry - maybe if I understood what the mechanics are, it would be fun, but given I don't and I can't find anything from which I could understand them, I just don't have fun. Seeing a scree saying ,,fail'' pop up over and over and over again, 60 seconds after you start a game and try to guess what you should do because it's not explained anywhere is just not fun. And it's a shame, the artstyle looks really nice and I think it has potencial, but in this state I just can't recommend it.