After watching too much YouTube, I came across a streamer playing this game called Freeways. It's a pretty simple PC puzzle game where you draw freeways! As you click into a single map, the sides of the screen haves roads either entering or exiting the screen. Each road wants to connect to another road on the side of the screen, or to a building in the middle of the screen. To create the road, you draw it with the mouse. Right click for bridges!
When you complete the roadways on the map, you click simulate and traffic pours into your roads. You are graded based on the complexity (difficulty) of the map, the amount of concrete you used, and the efficiency of the traffic, which is measured in its average speed through your roads. Occassionally, a map will have a score goal you should try to achieve. Getting the goal will unlock a photo of a real highway interchange to inspire more road building.
The YouTube channel I was following is called Real Civil Engineering. Apparently the guy worked in civil engineering for a while, and then quit to do YouTube stuff. His Freeways videos were fun because he often talked about the most efficient ways of building highway interchanges using the least amount of concrete and other strategies. After hearing about it enough, I wanted to try it, too.
Freeways was released in 2017 for iOS, PC, and Mac. I started playing it in January. There was a sale so it was only $5. BUT! It just so happened that after 8 years of no updates, Freeways got a full new expansion on Jan 28th for free!
The original game had 80 maps, and the new expansion gave us 81 new maps! So many maps! Many of these new maps were much harder than the original. Also, every map now had a target score to try and surpass.
And as another new feature, the game now had achievements! Only 4 achievements, though. Two of the achievemements were achieving all the goals on individual maps. The other two achievements were about surpassing a specific World Efficiency. World Efficiency is your grand total score of all your map scores on original and expansion maps. The original map efficiency score was 25000. The expansion map efficiency score was 40000.
After 3 months, I finally finished all of the new maps, and got all the achievements. Here are the maps of my roads.
Freeways is a fun game. The original maps are pretty easy and fun to run through. The expansion maps get pretty challenging and sometimes very hard and frustrating. You can buy it on Steam, or directly from the developer on itch.io.
I wonder if we'll get another 80 maps in 8 years again.