Game Review: Build Roads (Mobile – Free to Play)

From Rollic Games comes Build Roads which consists of the same handful of mini-games over and over again with the goal being to earn money and upgrade your company HQ. It’s super simple to play. In fact, it’s so simple, it quickly becomes monotonous and forgettable. That’s before we even get to the occasional lag issues in later levels and the horrendous ad spam.

So the main ‘gameplay’ aspect of Build Roads are the mini-games and they require very little thought to complete. In fact most just ask you to press your finger on the screen or swipe in a specific direction to complete. It’s incredibly lacking in depth or challenge but worst of all, incredibly uninteresting.

Move an industrial cleaner around to clear up dirt and garbage. Pour rocks, spread them and then crush them to create roads. Fix faulty traffic lights, construct power lines and a few more before the game repeats the same ones in rotation.

Compared to other games that follow this format (a current popular trend), Build Roads just feels so much lighter. Perhaps that comes down to the limited ‘upgrade’ options.

As you complete what the game calls ‘jobs’, you’ll earn money (watch an ad for even more) which is spent in three ways. The first and most obvious is the upgrade of your main HQ where each increase nets you more income on further jobs. The second and third are in the game’s store, where you can spend your money on different skins for your industrial cleaner or fleet of trucks.

With only 6 of each of each to unlock, it won’t take long for most players to have them all available. It’s so bare and lacking in content that it is already a game we’d recommend you avoid. However, what really makes it a horror show of a release are the ads.

Yes, ad-spam is par for the course in the free to play mobile market. However, every so often along comes a game that pushes it to far. Build Roads is one of those games where you get an ad after every level, most are un-skippable and sometimes you’ll even get more than one in a row.

After 5 minutes of this, you’ll close this down and delete it. Confident in the knowledge that it was not going to get any better.