Traffix XR: Cities Of Tomorrow Review – A Relaxing & Challenging VR Puzzler

Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow is a roadway management puzzler in mixed and virtual reality that’s equal parts relaxing and confounding.

I love puzzle games, especially in VR, where the ability to reach out and physically touch the mechanisms and toy-like worlds of the best puzzlers becomes even more effective and rewarding.

Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow is the latest such game to take over my Quest headset, and its blend of relaxing vibes and genuine challenge makes it a truly great puzzler. However, it can also be frustratingly difficult, and this stubborn difficulty combined with occasionally finicky controls mar what would otherwise be an almost perfect experience.

What is Traffix XR?

Traffix XR was developed by Infinity Games, who (among many other projects) have previously released a flat screen traffic management puzzle game called Traffix for Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and PC. While the earlier Traffix was presented with a simplistic and stylized aesthetic, and with gameplay in which you literally direct traffic by tapping on traffic lights, Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow takes a different road.

In Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow, you build miniature roadways to connect points of interest on a map in mixed reality or virtual reality (the latter of which places you in a generic and sparsely decorated living room). Connecting two points on the map will allow traffic and people to flow from one to the other, and back again, essentially activating these points of interest. Along the way, buildings will pop up as your city grows. New points of interest appear, and these too must be connected to the roadways, until all of the map’s points of interest are connected successfully.

The challenge comes from the difficult terrain of the given maps, and the limited resources available to you. In each stage, you’re provided a limited number of road tiles and a limited number of road types, and each map is typically arranged so that you must puzzle out the perfect routes that will link all points using only the number of tiles and road types available to you.

You can erase road tiles and redraw your route at any time, but obstacles, such as boulders and forests, rivers and lakes, will block your roadways. And even though you have bridges available to you, they aren’t unlimited. The sum total of all of this is that you’re going to have to think long and hard about how to get from Point A to Point B, and beyond, if you’ve any hope of success.

Those familiar with popular games like Mini Motorways will immediately understand what Traffix XR is doing. Those who have never played a traffic management game will pick it up pretty quickly, too, since its gameplay is intuitive and the built-in tutorial teaches everything you’ll need to know in about ten minutes.

Get in We’re Going Puzzling

There’s a lot to like about Traffix XR. Its miniature worlds are charming and rich with detail. Its soundtrack is smooth, playful, and relaxing. Its gameplay is built on a central mechanic that’s truly engaging. It has a vast quantity of maps, from a variety of interesting biomes to keep things interesting, and a custom map maker is also included for those who want to build and share their own creations.

But there are potholes, too.

The game can be played with hand tracking or controllers, and while each has their strengths and weaknesses, neither feels totally perfect. Grabbing roads with the controller or fingertips is sometimes equally unreliable. Erasing roads and linking roads you’ve already laid down with new ones can be troublesome, too. Even selecting a stage to play, which is done by rotating a mass of floating islands that surround you, is kind of annoying. Sometimes, triggers are used to grab things, while other times it’s performed with the grip buttons. It just feels like there’s not a lot of cohesion in the design language used for the game’s controls, and in a game like this, where natural control is so important, it’s a problem that slows the flow of the game considerably.

Then there’s the difficulty. This game is simply hard. By the fifth or sixth level, you’ll be scratching your head, struggling to find the perfect route through a cantankerous wilderness using only the tiles (and their configurations) available to you. When you manage to find the correct route, it all feels great. The citizens of your mini city get where they need to go, the city sprouts up like crabgrass in summer, and you clear the level (usually a three-stage affair).

But I’d be lying if I said this game didn’t frustrate me with its rigid demand that each stage be solved in exactly the way the developer intended. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me like many of the game’s puzzles could only be solved one way. For a traffic management game in which you spend the entirety of your playtime building creative roadways, this seems incredibly limiting.

Traffix XR: Cities of Tomorrow Review – Final Verdict

Traffix XR’s pieces come together into something charming, fun, and engaging (if flawed). It’s the sort of game that works perfectly in a mixed reality headset, with its cozy little worlds coming to life in your living room, and in VR, it works nearly as well. What holds it back from greatness, however, is the rigidity of its solutions. Too many stages feel overly difficult or solvable by only a single route, and its controls are a bit finicky. All that said, Traffix XR is a good game, and puzzle fans looking for a new puzzler on Quest will find much to like on its miniature motorways.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.