I haven’t played a city management game for a while and as you can imagine there is a lot to learn.  Thankfully, a useful tutorial broken down into manageable parts will help you overcome the initial onslaught of information you will require to succeed.  As you come to terms with how to build and manage it is time to move onto actually creating a city for yourself.  Starting off with building link roads into your town, you begin to understand the scale of the task but with helpful prompts as to what you should be doing along with some very useful interface tools you will have your City Hall, power and basic zoning built in no time.

At first, your new city may look a little messy, mine certainly did, but as you get used to strategy required to build your city and keep everything running smoothly you start to realise that certain elements may need demolishing to provide clean areas which are more easy to manage.  As with any game like this there are no ways of winning, just expanding and making a tonne of money.

Obviously, management is a huge part of the game and you can either macro and micro manage to your hearts desire. The depth of the management system is huge as you arrange loans, re-structure taxes, look at unemployment rates and adjust and create more zones to fill any void and desolve problems as they occur.  The main problem with this game is that this is all you really do and although the goals are their in a basic form and you also unlock more zones, buildings, decorations etc as your city gets bigger it would have been nice for Monte Cristo to include a challenge set where you have to rebuild a city after a major disaster or turn a city around from a being in the red to a very profitable one.

Graphically, Cities XL is sublime and very well textured for a game of this type.  You have your typical world view of the land and surroundings that you have available but zooming in provides the greatest surprise and possibly one of the standout features of the game in terms of look.  The viewing system acts a little like Google Earth and this system will allow you to zoom right into the heart of the city so you can see what’s going on.  people walking around, car driving through are all present ass you navigate around to see what is really going on.  Hours can be spent in this view and can distract from what you are really trying to achieve with the game but it is such good fun, you just won’t be able to help yourself.

Where Cities XL tries to stand out from its peers is by its treatment of resource management, online play and plug-in additions. Rather than just setting up the fundamentals of the economy and letting your little virtual industrialists get on with it, Cities XL requires you to actively get involved with the trading routes with other cities. After a certain point of development, your industries will require you to establish trading deals with foreign powers if you want to develop any further. In the single player offline mode this will be through the faintly sinister OmniCorp, trading utility resources (water, electricity, etc) for cash. The system is simple enough, but to be honest, really adds little to the gameplay experience. It is too simple a set-up to please the micro-economic management aficionados, and too much of a distraction from being an All Mighty Omniscient Mayor and Builder Of Things for the regular player.

Cities XL has got the city-building basics spot on, and by far the most fun you will have is just playing around with the building blocks when you do not have the constraints of goals or budget to worry about. The economics and civic mechanics are all straight forward enough to understand, and the interface is intelligently designed, but they lack any real innovation or nuance that you haven’t already seen elsewhere. Once your city is established the actual challenge becomes nothing more than to wait until your citizenry asks for something, build it, wait till they ask for something else repeat adinfinitum. The additional charges to access game features that seem like they should be included seems just a little craven, especially given how little the much vaunted online functionality actually adds to your gaming experience. Cities XL performs all the basics admirably, and gives a friendly and enjoyable city building experience. If your system has the clout,the graphics can also be excellent, showing the player impressive urban vistas when you pan the camera low, and jolly cartoon citizens going about their business in full zoom. Cities XL lacks any notable innovations, though, and those additions it does have are under-developed and certainly over-priced, insufficient to differentiate itself or to make its mark on the genre made by SimCity. Yikes – someone hold her hair, would they?

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