What happens if you cross 3D Tetris with a timebound city builder? You’d get something akin to Mini City Mayhem. It is a game of many colours and styles which makes it approachable for gamers who either want high-stakes pressure or a zen approach to its gameplay mechanics. Not everything lands consistently but there is a lot to enjoy here.
Mini City Mayhem is a game about keeping up with population expansion and this acts like a timer. Your mini city is block-based and you are tasked to place various coloured apartment blocks into the city. Each block brings a base capacity for residents but you cannot build out too far as your city is an island and must place your buildings attached to a road. This means very quickly, you’ll need to start thinking about building upwards. You might place a red building block down and then connect other red buildings to it to expand the floor but you can keep on stacking upwards to ensure there is floor space for different types of buildings. As you proceed in the game not only do the building shapes get more complex but buildings start to have rules applied to them. Some can only be placed on the floor. Others can only to placed one, two, three or four blocks high. As a player, you are usually able to choose from four or five different blocks for your next move so choose wisely as building up means more population capacity.
Mayhem mode turns your population expanse limit as a timer. If you don’t build quickly enough, you’ll reach maximum capacity. At this point, your city’s patience meter starts to drop. If your city’s patience drops to zero, it’s game over. To help you keep up with the population expanse you can level up your city by dropping a certain amount of buildings into it. Upon leveling up you can choose to unlock one of three bonus buildings from a pool of them. Some will slow down the population expansion. Others will increase the maximum population allowed or the total amount of city patience. Again, these take up floor space so you need to keep that in mind to not box yourself in or limit future moves. Mayhem mode is chaotic, tense, and energetic. It’s great fun but you must be fully switched on to keep up.
On the flip side, Zen mode removes all the population and patience elements of the game. Instead, without a timer, Mini City Mayhem becomes a thoughtful 3D Tetris game that is far easier to win than Mayhem mode. Once you’ve levelled up your city in either mode, you need to place down a monument in the centre of the city to win the game. In Mayhem mode, as it is so tight with the clock, you’ll be rushing to place it. With Zen mode, you can keep on expanding and building up to your heart’s content as the difficulty barrier is so low. I started with Zen mode but soon switched to Mayhem when I learnt the game mechanics and then found Zen wasn’t very engaging. That’s also due to the Sandbox mode the game comes with allows freeform building so it’s more expressive than Zen and equally lacking difficulty.
There are two more modes that are equally polarising. Crane mode is a timing-based mini-game dropping buildings on a stack as they swing from a crane. It is a quick distraction but not something with staying power. Square Stack mode is an absolute blast though. Here you are trying to survive as long as possible by building a 3D tower using 3D blocks. It is a small square 3D Tetris game with an incredibly tight time limit that signals game over if you don’t place a block extremely quickly. It is the most frantic and immediate game mode and very tricky to perfect. Whilst the game itself ran well, I couldn’t get the online leaderboards to work. It was only the Square Stack mode’s online leaderboard I was interested in, to be honest – it’s a real score attack gem.
The distinctive pressurised environment of Mini City Mayhem in its core gameplay mode is what makes this pint-sized city builder stand out. Fast, frantic, tricky, and at times quite addictive – it serves up some good treats for a very reasonable price. You might have to wrestle with its camera and controls a bit on rare occasions, and some of the other modes aren’t quite as engaging as the main event, but there is plenty to get stuck into if you like a game that puts a twist on tried and tested genres.
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