You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams!
Freeways is a mobile simulation game developed and published by Captain Games and released in September, 2017. A release for Steam followed in October, 2017. In the game the player must draw roads and bridges to connected dead-end roads and allow traffic to flow. If the traffic should become gridlocked the player fails the level. At the end of every level time advances rapidly as cars are shown driving on the roads and then the player is awarded an efficiency score.The game is not to be confused with Freeway, a similarly named Atari 2600 game.
Freeways provide examples of the following tropes:
- Acceptable Break from Reality: The game uses the Rule of Fun for the player to build a road system.
- Automated Automobiles: The vehicles are stated to be this in the docs, and the driving algorithm is based on how real self-driving cars will operate.
- Automatic New Game: When the game starts the player is automatically taken through a tutorial sequence and then right into the first level.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The color of each vehicle indicates which road it's going to.
- Cosmetic Award: If you get a high enough score on certain levels, you unlock pictures of real world highway interchanges.
- Critical Existence Failure: If a gridlock occurs the player fails the current level.
- Gameplay Grading: In each level, you're given a score based on the speed of the traffic, amount of concrete used, and overall complexity of the interchange. In certain levels, if you get a high enough score, you unlock a picture of a real-world interchange.
- Level Editor: There is a hidden level editor, accessed by pressing Control+E, though it's a relatively unstable tool meant for development.
- Only One Save File: You can only keep one completed interchange for each level. If you want to replay a level, you have to clear the interchange, and start over.
- Space-Management Game: A lot of the challenge of the game is fitting the roadways into each level. Many of the later levels leave only narrow corridors open to build roads.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: There are a few levels that do not allow you to build bridges, and all the roads must be at the same grade.
