Build cities in a hurry in Mini City Mayhem.
City management games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines require you to plan ahead and keep on top of a huge swathe of land. Mini City Mayhem demands that you do that but under a strict time limit. Keep building, keep the population under control, and keep your job long enough for a monument to be built to commemorate your success. Or panic, put buildings in stupid places, and lose the support of your people in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.
There’s no story here, which is fine. Mini City Mayhem is all about its gameplay loop, and it’s a fun loop at that. Once you’ve picked the city you want to build from a list of real places, you’ll be given a patch of land with a single building and a handful of roads. Your job is to use the cards at the bottom of the screen to build roads, buildings, and amenities until you’ve levelled up enough to build that city’s famous monument.
As you build, the population will increase until the city is full, at which point people will start to become impatient about how crowded it is. If they run out of patience, you lose. The only way to bring things back under control is to keep building. It’s not as simple as constantly slapping down buildings though. Not only do you have to manage your money which accumulates very slowly at first, but you also need to consider which structures should go by each other.
The cards you have will have different coloured and shaped buildings. Putting buildings of matching colours next to each other will give you a boost to your total population capacity, allowing you to stave off impatience for longer. To add some complexity, the buildings you draw will be of different shapes and sizes, meaning you need to think carefully about what to place in what spots to minimise wasted space. Further, every new building has to be placed next to a road, so you’ll also need to play road cards to expand your placement options. Interestingly, you can also build upwards by stacking buildings atop each other so long as there’s a flat surface and a road nearby.
The tricky bit is that the cards you get are randomised, meaning you’ll sometimes be stuck with buildings that don’t have flat roofs or simply won’t fit in the spaces you have left. You’ll need to think quickly to handle these blockages before time runs out. There’s a stress management element here as well as keeping on top of the space you have available, and I really enjoyed that fast thinking part of the game. It helps that a full game takes only about ten minutes, meaning a failure doesn’t set you back much.
As you level up, you’ll unlock counsellors and specialist buildings that offer a bonus, like greater patience thresholds or free road cards. The former tend to offer long term benefits, whilst the latter are actual buildings that require placement by a road to take effect, using up even more of your capacity. There’s a neat element of specialising here, with you picking combinations that you think will be most effective for what you’re trying to construct.
I had fun with Mini City Mayhem. It’s light and easy to get into, and even has a few additional modes to mess about with too. There’s a Zen mode that removes the time limit, and a fun vertical construction game in which you are locked into a square of land and have to build upwards within a time limit, almost like reverse Tetris. These are nice inclusions, but they really feel like novelties rather than anything worth sinking time into. I messed around with them a little, but quickly found myself wanting to get back to the actual game.
I quite liked the artistic approach of the game. The design is fun and light hearted, and the colours bright. The colours were an issue here and there though, as some of the special buildings might be, for example, red, but not the same red as your main buildings, meaning constructing next to them doesn’t net you any bonuses. I found this needlessly confusing at times, and it slowed me down when I needed to be speeding up. Once you recognise how the buildings look, you tend to reduce this issue somewhat though. The camera can be more of a problem, mind, blocking your visual when trying to get a certainly coloured block in a specific space in a rush. You tend not to have long to worry about it by that point, and losing a game because of the camera is a little annoying. The music is fine at best, and the sound effects unobtrusive. There’s not much to be said about the soundscape in general other than it’s inoffensive.
Mini City Mayhem is an enjoyable fast-paced puzzler that I can see being addictive, especially if you try out the very challenging Mayhem difficulty mode that’s clearly designed for maniacs. Whilst it isn’t deep, it is fun, and puzzle heads will get a kick out of it.
Mini City Mayhem is available now on PC.
