Review: Cities XL

Those of you who have played City Life will be fully aware of the utter anarchy involved in trying to organise your city. Simply put, Monty Cristo decided that instead of you having to deal with “under the cover” SimCity resources such as “Does everyone have plumbing?” and “You do realise an entire quarter of your city doesn’t have power and stinks of rotten fish from the waste dump?” they decided to manage these for you and instead place you in charge with the complicated process of managing the different working classes of people who live in your city. This involved placing unqualified workers together, qualified workers somewhere else, executives near to the qualified workers (though not too near, what have you Jeeves!) and so on and so forth. In effect the start of your city was all about the micro management of the people, rather than the micro management of the system. The city simulator became confusingly difficult since it effectively created a several tier based class system around your city until you could at least build it up to mega heights.

These were City Life’s faults, and Monty Cristo has compensated for this slightly. Gone is the colour chart that seemed to go with this class system (unqualified red, qualified blue, executive orange etc). The worry of having to deal with these different types of classes mingling together doesn’t exist too much, praise be to Monty Cristo for listening and improving the city simulator that wants to challenge Maxis.

Before you go praising them too much though, there is a but. Somewhere in the development pits of Monty Cristo they came up with a new nightmare that would feed upon our souls and cause us even more trouble trying to build our perfect city. That nightmare is an economy! Though you still have to worry about the basic management of making sure your civilians have employment, entertainment and retail, you now also have to worry about gathering resource tokens. These tokens are created for each resource you have in abundance in your city, or will be created for each resource you require. This is all placed upon a globe where other people (multiplayer people!) are building cities, trading resources and trying to make it big in the world.

So suddenly your city simulator has crossed into the realms of an MMO. You’ll quickly find you’ll make and need resources depending on where you build on the world. Deserts will naturally have oil, but will desperately need water. Lake areas will have water, but may need fuel in the future. Your city does have options to build electricity supplies, waste dump units and other options, but you’ll always find something becomes a neccessity, and you’ll need to trade.

Luckily since the closed beta the option of trading has become easier and automatic now. People place trade options onto the trading system, and other people can buy from them. The result is you can alleviate any problems with simple trading. Should the trade be expensive there is always an AI based Omnicity that will trade at a set price, and that price usually determines competition among other cities.

Sounds great doesn’t it? Well…it is. Sort of. It can become frustrating at times however, but there is an irony to it. Where in Sim City you built these resources because your people needed them, in City Life you build them in order to trade and make sure you’re not under resourced or over resourced. The game though on paper is just the same. You’ll find you can build wind turbines for cheap, clean electricity, but these have  a monthly cost of 500 credits. So after a certain amount of wind turbines have been built, it will become cheaper to build an electricity plant to take over the wind turbines job. Water plants can be built until it’s better to buy a resourcer. Farming is good if you have the area space for it, but is the cheaper of the trading tokens.

Thankfully though the social class clashing has been removed, or at least loosened up a little bit. It becomes plainly obvious as you play the game that you’ll want to build executives next to each other, and in an area near to qualified workers and high tech industry or offices. Elite are placed near Executives and Qualified. Unqualified and qualified can be built together with no quarrel, though if you want your city to look nice you’ll probably want to seperate them slightly.

Then, when you can take a break for a bit (and be warned there’s no pause button that I can see, so taking a break is difficult), you can finally zoom all the way in and walk among the streets of your glorious city. This has always been a great aspect for the City games. You never quite see what your city really looks like on a top down view, as hills and terrain don’t fully show. When you’re on the ground you see just how exciting you’ve made your city by doing such a simple thing as making roads and streets and parks. You have rolling hills, alleyways, parks leading to other parts of the city, roads going up and down. It is a nice sight to see.

Cities XL is a good game, but there is a final problem with it; subscription. In order to play on the world mode along with others you need to pay a monthly subscription of about £4. This is rather ridicolous; £4 could be saved to buy Sim City 4, or possibly even spent on the older Sim City games. It’s extremely difficult to justify the price tag on playing this game all for the sake of being on a multiplayer world and being able to trade tokens. Supposedly there is an offline mode, though I’ve yet to find it yet.

Other problems are that the game is slightly buggy and slow. The testing system of a Q6600 processor, 4gb of RAM and a 8800GT card had some moments of sluggishness, particularly if the daylight cycle was running. Dropping a huge construction build onto the world can result in a sudden dreaded stop, before finally performing the task. It’s not game crippling, but it’s noticable. Final problems are the avatar editor that is given to you at the start of the game, in order for you to travel as a person in different cities being built. Needless to say if you successfuly manage to create a none ugly person, be grateful.

It is up to you though, and if you do decide to buy Cities XL and join the world mode you will find a comfortable fun little city simulation game. Is it better than Sim City? It certainly has its moments, none more so than the ability to zoom all the way in and walk around your beautiful city. It’s enjoyable, quick and fun.

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