Welcome to Freeways! Freeways is a game about drawing the best roadways design to clear each level with the highest score possible; however, the game takes on a new theme when trying to complete a set of levels as quickly as possible. The guide below aims to serve as a base for starting a speedrun of the game. This guide goes into the mechanics of the game and tips/tricks for completing the speedrun.

Mechanics

You control the game almost exclusively with the mouse and use the cursor to draw roadways. There are a few helpful shortcuts on the keyboard – “a/z” raises and lowers the road level, “t” will simulate the level once complete, and “c” will clear the level. Right-clicking will also raise the road level, but only while holding the right mouse button. Once the mouse button is released, you’ll draw at the lower level. The goal is to connect each traffic source to their destination. You can click on a traffic source to start a roadway, or you can draw a roadway at any point on the map by clicking and drawing. Most levels allow the player to use bridges and the grade of the bridge can be adjusted by clicking the menu buttons that are usually at the bottom corner of the screen. I highly recommend watching Real Civil Engineer’s series of this game, it’s a good series and he does a great job explaining how the game works. One thing you won’t find is an undo button…by design unfortunately but doesn’t impact the speedrun of the game too much.

Once you’ve connected each traffic source to their destination, text will pop-up and you will be allowed to simulate traffic flow through your roadways. In a normal play-through, your goal is to achieve the highest score by balancing high traffic flow with the amount of concrete used to build the roadway, and the score is given to the player once the simulation is complete. The amount of concrete available is shown with the dump-truck on the menu bar, the level of gray concrete will decrease as you place more roads. However, you have a LOT of concrete at your disposal, the chance of you running out of concrete is slim.

This, however, is not a normal play-through of the game. In a speedrun, all we care about is that the level works. The traffic can creep along at 5 freedom units pers hour but if the simulation completes then the level is successful. (Your RUN may still be impacted, read on for more!) Thus, your goal is to figure out the quickest way you can draw roadways to complete the level, with faster execution leading to better times overall.

Tips, and Tricks

When building new roads and bridges in real life, there’s no way to undo mistakes. Just like in real life, you also can’t fix a mistake in this game. I’m going to assume that it was an intentional design choice instead of the developer embracing pain and suffering. You have only two options once making a mistake: erase the level in its entirety and start over or live with the mistake and work around it. You’ll make mistakes, but most mistakes you can work around just fine.

Speaking of bridges – of the two ways to place a bridge, the fastest (and thus most recommended) method of placing bridges is to right-click as you’re drawing a road. A key to faster speedruns of this game is to minimize the amount of time your cursor is not drawing a road to complete the level. Where you can avoid using bridges, do so. Where you must use a bridge, work on using the right mouse button to draw the bridge. However, there’s a catch of finnicky mechanics that make this technique harder to use: if you click on an existing road to make a junction, and you make the bridge too close to the center of the existing road, the pathing will “cut” the original road and essentially remove that path you’ve already made. Use all the space available to you and work on delaying the bridge creation to avoid this glitch from happening. If it does happen, just use a road to connect the broken path back up.

Another tip – if you do have to place a bridge with a right-click and have it connected with another bridge already made, then the process for doing so is…finicky. If drawing a bridge with a right-click, then you stop drawing the bridge by releasing the right mouse button while holding the left mouse button and you can continue to draw a road. However, if you have your cursor drawing the bridge over the bridge you want to connect with, and you release the right mouse button, you’ll just start drawing a road instead of connecting the bridges up. I recommend avoiding connecting bridges wherever possible, but there are few techniques that will work decently quickly. One method is to hold down the left and right mouse buttons and draw the new bridge past the old bridge. If done correctly, the new bridge will connect with the old bridge. Another method is to draw two bridges somewhere else, and then click one of the bridges to start a new path. Doing so will start drawing a bridge instead of a road without holding down the right mouse button. The final method is to draw the road out a bit, stop drawing, then press “a” to raise the bridge without right clicking. Make sure to move the mouse a bit ahead of the direction you were drawing the road to reduce the amount of time not spent drawing roads.

This ultimately is a pretty simple game, best of luck in your speedrun!