izigame.me

Mini Metro is a simple optimization problem which delights on the outset, but then wears its welcome thin the deeper you go into the mechanics. As this is a game with nearly no audio or visual flair, the mechanics make or break your experience, and unfortunately they're more tedious and random than skillful, which in the end drags the game all the way down.
The core concept is rock solid: make an optimal metro system by connecting stations with lines such that the through traffic doesn't overflow. If too many passengers are stuck at any given node, you lose. There is a simple elegance to the design, and the learning process is snappy; the first 10 or so hours are a blast to play as you find optimal strategies. There are strokes of game design brilliance in here too: I love how tunnels give you a terrain obstacle to optimize around (wouldn't have hated more of these), especially in how they interact with loops; either you build a suboptimal line using less tunnels or you loop your system, but use more tunnels. There are other nuances I can praise, but all in all, you will be shocked at how this little game hooks you. Unsurprisingly, the next step is to 100% the game, which is where everything falls apart.
I got fairly far in that process, and along the way I realized just how tedious what I was doing was. I stopped having fun, mostly because the game had devolved to something that is far away from what I originally fell in love with. Ghost lines are the worst offender; a completely and utterly broken mechanic that is not just necessary but also remarkably boring. In essence, if you pause, create a line, then delete the line, it will still go to its destination (like a ghost) and then you can redraw that line elsewhere and it's like 2 trains are running for the price of one. You can win the entire game by spamming this strategy .... just pausing and unpausing over and over and over to optimally place lines ad nauseum. I've heard others say that it feels like cheating, and I can't help but agree. It's that broken, and goes completely counter to the game's core design.
If that wasn't bad enough, so much of the game is random. If a bunch of the same shape randomly spawns in the same corner of the screen, your chances of winning plummet. Also, upgrade screens are imbalanced; carriages are far and away the best upgrade (to the point that if you don't pick them, you're missplaying terribly most of the time), so if you don't get them (and many times you won't), you are far behind where you otherwise would be. The cherry on top of this RNG sundae is that there are some achievements which are neigh unbeatable without good RNG: examples include when you don't get lines in maps which limit the number of trains you can have per line, or even worse (and my least favorite archetype), maps which say you can only have 8 stations per line BUT STATIONS CAN SPAWN ON YOUR LINES meaning you can randomly lose at any time.
So I mean, yeah, I could grind the remaining achievements. But...why? Why pause and unpause over and over again, drawing ghost line after ghost line to suffer through these final stages? It's not hard exactly, but I would have to trudge through tons of tedium and RNG, and I don't know, my life and time is too valuable for that.
It's a cute indie game with a rock solid premise, and nerds out there like me will be hooked by that concept immediately. Optimizing is fun, and that learning process is rewarding. It's a shame that the end state of that learning is so dreadfully boring.