John "wardrox"
Critique, Review Monday, October 26th 2009

4 Comments

I am not qualified to talk about Cities XL. SimCity is one of my earliest memories of gaming. The Maxis logo is engrained on my brain from SimCity 2000. Do you remember SimCopter where you can fly around your SimCity 2000 city? No? I do. I played Transport Tycoon (and later Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe) for hours, never with competitors enabled, just building; faster, larger, more complex. This was my gaming nirvana and it’s because of my experience that I can tell you to disregard most of what I say when it comes to Cities XL. I have barely scratched the surface.

These simulation/city building games are vast. You do not play them lightly. It’s my respect for the genera and my understanding that (at least for now) I’ve not played enough to give a proper opinion that makes this a Not Review.

Cities XL is a city building MMO (though if you don’t want to pay the subscription, the game can be played offline in a single player mode). You choose to build your city on a planet with thousands of other players. Over time you can build more cities, build up trades and really engage in the global economic community. The game comes with a web based portal too; because you never want to be too far away.

After making a generic yet mohawked avatar (the customisation options here are just silly in their scope) the game walks you through a few basic tutorials to get you started. The pacing is great for new players. Nearly everything is blocked off until your city reaches a set size, meaning you avoid the overwhelming complexity that plagues nearly every game like this.

Quite soon into the tutorial you learn about the zoom function. Scroll the mouse wheel down and zoom out to a satellite view. Scroll up and you can zoom down to street level. By which I mean; you are walking along the street watching individual people travelling around your city along side individual Ford cars and past the Novotel branded billboards (I didn’t spot the in-game advertising until I took a second stroll around my town). The scale legitimately impressed me, but then again many things impress me these days (I may be being impressed simply because I haven’t played many good looking PC games lately).

Everything just looks smooth and nice. Sadly, along with these impressive graphics comes some chugging on the part of my older-then-it-should-be laptop. Away with the sexy high settings and in with the cubey low settings for me. However; if you’re playing this game for the graphics, you’re doing it wrong.

This game is about city building and building cities is what you do, mostly in the form of roads, zoning and placing specific buildings. The three main zones you can create; residential, industrial and commercial are each divided into further types of each. Got some offices? Best get some skilled worker accommodation. But what density? Oh the choices! Things seem to have got more complicated since I last built a city. Balancing the zones’ sizes, proximities and more subtle details like happiness, employment and pollution etc. really is the core of any city game and Cities XL is no exception.

Enjoyably, and I’m sure any Sim fan is going to realise how out of touch I am with these things, you can build diagonals! And it doesn’t stop there: although things generally try to align, you really do have a lot of freedom when it comes to layout. Instead of the ridged grids I’m used to I can finally make much more organic looking cities. It’s a small touch, but I appreciate it. Whilst efficiency is my number one concern, it’s nice to look good.

All of this so far seems like fairly standard stuff. Where I’ve seen the most potential with this game is with the multiplayer. This is also one of the areas I need to come clean and admit I have limited experience with. Every city produces stuff and every city requires stuff. The game has a built-in trading system to allow you to propose and receive trading contracts with other cities (run by other, real people). As the game points out, a city mayor with friends can go far. If you’ve got no friends you can still set up trades, only with OmniCorp who are always worse than trading with players, but better than nothing.

If, like me, you find yourself wanting to observe rather than do any of the hard work, then the game can accommodate that too. From the planet screen you can select any other city on the planet and go have a look. This is where your avatar comes in. You appear within the city and can just have a wonder around. Get inspired, laugh at their awful planning skills or do the MMO-standard and just dance.

The game is vast and if you can stay interested, provides all the basic requirements of a quality city building game. Whilst it hasn’t pulled me in off the bat, it’s a title I think I’ll be returning to from time to time, though almost certainly only in offline mode and I know for a fact I’ll never be smart enough to see more than a fraction of what’s on offer.