Cities XL Review (PC)

Posted by Sergiu Petrisor in PC Reviews on Oct 23rd, 2009 | no responses

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Gamesonice.com rating: 1 vote, average: 3.00 out of 5

Cities XL is developed and published by Monte Cristo Games.

Cities XL is meant to be an online game, although you can play the game as a single player, though you must log on first. The single player mode allows you to build on twenty-five different landscapes with no objective; while this allows you to do pretty much anything you want, having more direction or some concrete goals (like making a manufacturing hub or tourist attraction) would grant added motivation. The environments are varied and quite large, easily allowing for huge complex cities to be developed. Since the developers used real-life terrain to make some of the locales, it would be nice if the same tools were offered to the consumer (this will no doubt be included in a later expansion pack). Other highly-touted features are also missing, such as the GEMs: mini-games, like running a ski resort, will break up the monotony of running a metropolis, but only when they are actually released (for a price, of course). It’s difficult to access the quality of the GEMs if they do not exist. Blueprints can also be earned so that you can construct famous landmarks, although they are granted at random through a lottery instead of being awarded to good players based on skill.

Online play in Cities XL costs $10 a month, and it’s totally not worth it. You are paying for a glorified chat room and the ability to trade with other human players; since you can trade with the AI in single player mode anyway, this is a silly bonus feature. That’s not all: you can create a completely useless avatar that is rarely seen in-game and get access to twenty-five more map styles as a bribe to give the developer some extra cash each and every month. You can visit other people’s cities, which is kind of neat, but the server performance is terrible, with frequent disconnects which makes it impossible to trade and even exit the game. Since saving is done automatically when you exit, if you are disconnected while playing, all of your recent progress is lost and you can’t even leave the game. Nice. You receive a discount (meaning not free, even though you are paying them a monthly fee) on future GEMs, whenever they happen to be released. $10 a month for a chat room and trades with real people? No thanks.

The best aspect of Cities XL is the interface: it is well done and provides easy access to important data. All of your zoning and construction tools are given along the left side of the screen: fairly traditional. Along the top you have information about your budget, population, resources, and businesses. The budget screen breaks down tax income and expenditures and lists the most and least profitable businesses. Population data displays the satisfaction of your citizens along with unemployment, occupancy, and immigration rates. The resources screen lists those goods that you produce and need as part of your economy. Finally, clicking on a business type or population group will display a number of important needs in an easy-to-understand, one-click-accessible list. The overlay system uses colors to highlight various parts of your city, and this is the most cumbersome aspect of the interface because of its confusing organization (traffic is in the economy category?). Still, you can display a wide range of data, from population density to pollution to satisfaction with security and fire services.