Cities XL Review

Cities XL is a game in which you can go worldwide and create cities. It is complex and this made it difficult to review at certain points. In Solo Mode you have five different terrains - coasts, mountains, valleys, canyons, and great plains. In each terrain you have up to five different cities ranging in difficulty, and you must keep note of how much flat or fertile land there is, and whether it is holiday suitable, alongside other factors. 

In this game you have to be tactical as rushing in to buy everything you can lay your hands on is unwise due to monthly costs. Nevertheless, although it is tactical, there is a form of gambling involved. For example, you can loose money rapidly, so one minute you may have 800,000 credits, and then all of a sudden, you can have -120,000 credits. You can do many things to get out of debt like changing the tax rates and deleting buildings. Taking out loans is an option too, however it is highly ill-advised.

This is going to be a hard game to explain, so for those of you who haven't played a city building game before, this should give you a heads up.

Breaking the game down, you have four different types of accommodation for the workers, called "Zoning": unqualified workers; qualified workers; executive workers; and elite workers. To get this working you select an area on the map where you would like to place the buildings. You then select what type of worker you would like to attract. At the start of the game, you can only make accommodation for unqualified workers, the other three are not unlocked until your population grows more: the higher the population, the more advanced workers you can unlock. After selecting the type of worker to attract, you'll need to designate the density of the buildings. This allows you to choose building sizes, from smaller houses to larger-scale tower blocks. These work the same as accommodation, where you can unlock the higher densities as you gather a bigger population.

You'll be able to construct a number of industries for your city, which includes the entire range you might expect a city might need. You'll have access to manual industry - such as Farming, Heavy Industry and Factories - as well as retail with shops and hotels to more tourism based buildings such as museums, bowling alleys or Ferris wheels. You'll also be required to build Utilities for your citizens, including electricity and water or Police, Fire and Medical services. Some of these sections are only allowed to be built on specific parts of the land, such as farming areas belonging to fertile land, and holiday hotels near a beach.

You can also add decorations like Trees, Plazas, where you can fill empty spaces and vacant lots, Parks and Monuments, which improves your citizens' quality of life, Terraforming, which is where you can flatten land, and Blueprints, which is for more advanced stuff later on the game. On the note of flattening land, you don't actually have to flatten it to place down houses or roads. Some hills can be too sloped; therefore houses cannot be built in this area because they run a risk of falling off, and thus, cannot be placed in those areas. I think it is really handy because it saves you trying to flatten the whole land in order to place something, which then makes things a lot easier because it alters the land automatically for you.

You then have the two last icons: one being Transport, and the other being The Bulldozer. For transport you can have different roads (free angle roads, roads with 90° or 45° angles, or curved roads, highways, bridges and tunnels (if a bridge goes through a hill, it automatically creates a tunnel; you can also alter the heights of the bridges, however it is really finicky), and international transportation (which are basically airports and harbours). When you bulldoze, you can select one of two options: one, delete single objects; or two delete a group of objects in the designated area.

It automatically saves at frequent intervals, which can be useful in case the PC crashes, however it does also prevent cheating if something goes wrong in your game.. Another thing I like about the game is that you can see how satisfied each individual type of business and housing is, as well as many other features, like where the pollution is and how many wealthy people are in your city. I really like this analysis feature because then you know exactly why and how to satisfy your citizens, because you don't want unhappy citizens since unhappy citizens are going to leave your city. There are many different tabs in which to do different things. For example you can edit resources, your city taxes, take out loans and see how well all the companies are doing (such as which buildings cost the most in monthly costs and the company you get the most money out of).

With overproduction of products, you can trade with other cities depending on how much underproduction and overproduction you have. You‘re given tokens for them (if you have an overproduction, then you have one plus; and if you have underproductions of products, it is -one and less), and whether other cities want to buy or sell them, you'll need these tokens to trade with them. In the Solo Mode, you can only trade with a place called OmniCorp (which is basically an AI), while on Planet Mode, you can trade with people worldwide, as well as OmniCorp.

In Planet Mode, it is similar - gameplay wise - to the Solo Mode, however, the multiplayer fasctors make it very different. You start off by choosing a planet to build your city on, and are given a large selection of land to begin the building of your cities. . Whilst managing and creating your city you are constantly in an online chat with the other people who have built a city on that world, just generally updating people on how far you've got, or asking people what to do if you are stuck. You can also go and visit their cities, to see how they organised the layout.

Although the game is out, it constantly gets updated, because the developers are always thinking of new improvements and modifications to put into the game. One project that they will be bringing into the game in the near future is GEMs (Gameplay Extension Modules). What this basically is, is independent games within Cities XL, like expansion packs. In each pack, instead of managing the whole city, you can manage funfairs or car manufacturing factories, amongst other businesses which are within your city.

When you first get the game you get a username and password so that you can log into the online servers. What was nice about it was that when you first get the game, I was given a seven day free trial for the online play, nevertheless it started automatically, and not when you first play online. Once you're logged in, you get to create your ‘avatar' which is basically a lifelike mayor, representing you when you visit other people's cities. The detail you can put into the mayor is phenomenal, because not only can you change the height, weight and chest size of your mayor, you can also adjust the depth of the face and its features as well as other parts of the body, like the feet.

After creating your mayor, you then go on to a very thorough tutorial about how to play the game and how to control your newly-developed city. I found it very helpful and I found that I didn't have to go back and look at the tutorials again (which is an option you can choose in the main menu).

This game is all about detail. Three words to describe Cities XL is detail, detail and more detail. From creating the mayor, to the detail in the way you play the game, from zooming in and out to the way the road system works, everything evolves around the in depth detail. When zooming in and out I was astounded by everything you could see, it was all so clear. You could see each individual building, person and car, as well as all the flora. Also with road systems you can see how congested it is and you can ‘upgrade' them to go one way or even into a different road.

All in all, this game is really in-depth, and has a lot of potential with the updates and expansion packs coming its way. I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and will play more of it in the future. We asked some of the players in the chat rooms about the game and we only got positive feedback from them, including the player's views that the monthly fee was reasonable and worth it.

At the time of this review the monthly fee is the following.
£6.95 for one month,
£8.95 for two months (£4.48 a month),
£11.95 for three months (£3.98 a month).

There really is a lot to this game and feel free to add your own comments or even ask questions about the game.