I've enjoyed myself here, but Cities XL does not live up to its ambitions. Having that MMO chat-box in the corner of the screen is fun and useful - you get questions quickly answered by the helpful little community that is always online - but right now the further consequences of going online don't seem vital, even to a wizened old internet junkie like me. This is a game with big plans.īut these plans don't really influence what we currently play, which is an engaging, challenging, but fundamentally wonky city-building game that you can, should you wish, take into the theatre of other people. It's also talking about mini-expansions that will create extra management-game layers within your game-world - a ski resort, for example. Developer Monte Cristo promises much more to play with in future, including a train network and other vital elements of urban modernity that do not currently appear in the game. Right now that economic game isn't interesting, complex, or coherent enough to be anything other than an eccentric sideline to the (fairly demanding) business of keeping your city afloat.Ĭities XL is, quite explicitly, a work in progress. Online conceits - like being able to visit each other's cities with your mayoral avatar - really don't seem to add anything to the game, despite being able to dance like a chicken in the middle of the street. This kind of unfinished edge ultimately feels representative of the game as a whole. None of this is helped by the laggy, clunky and buggy trade interface. Environmental concerns eventually kick in if you rely on dirty factories for money. I tried that with a friend, but it took us a long time to even set up contracts, let alone make any difference to each others' cities. You can even enter into specific contracts with your fellow players, so that if he's producing lots of X, and needs your surplus of Y, you can help each other out over the long term. Any resource type can end up being something you'll use to gain traction in the multiplayer game, which is a trading, player-driven economy.įind yourself with a shortfall in electricity, or office space? Well, you can simply buy what's on the market. This might be water, fuel, fertile land, or holiday locales, or a combination of these. There's a consideration here that is missing from most city games, which is the resources you have in your slice of the world. When you get to the planet mode - which is an additional expense to play, after the first free week - you can select from a number of planets and then find a spot to build your business. Then there's the matter of the online game. You can evolve some incredible cityscapes in it - and that's something few of us outside of Dubai's oil barons will ever get to play with. Nevertheless, if you can ignore the logical and infrastructural quirks of Cities XL, this is a competent and occasionally spectacular city-building sandbox. I find myself pining for the water-flow grids of SimCity 2000, or the need to connect up the power. As long as they're on the road grid, everything works. Although you do have to provide fuel, water and electricity later on, these are simply facilities that you can build anywhere in a city. What's odd, too, is that there's no real facility for infrastructure outside of road-building and zoning. As it stands in Cities XL, you find yourself deleting very expensive constructs because they end up costing too much. Other games have employed spend sliders and such, allowing you to moderate your expenditure a little more subtly. A small hospital, for example, tops out at a cost of 5000 a month, and it will just do that when the population it serves is at the right level. What the utilities in Cities XL seem to lack is any capacity for you to control how much money they spend.
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