Cities XL Review

I’m a pretty big fan of sim games, especially the Sim City series, so I was pretty excited to get my hands on Cities XL.  Cities XL is a next generation city builder game that combines elements of MMO games by allowing you to interact with thousands of others city builders.  Monte Cristo, the developers behind Cities XL, have done something that Maxix (developers behind Sim City) hasn’t been able to do for over a decade, completely revitalize the city sim game.  Check out the Cities XL review below.

As with any MMO, the first thing you do in CitesXL is create a avatar.  This is mainly pointless as your avatar just sits in a little window at the top of your screen watching you as you build your city.  You can take you avatar on a stroll through your city or other players cities, but again it’s very pointless.

Next we are taken to Planet mode, this is where we can select our location to build our city.  Each location on the map has certain resources such as fuel, water, food and holidays.  Holidays just means your cities resource will be tourism.  Most cities give you two or three resources and you have to decide what you want.

Cities XL City Building

Now we can finally get to actually building our city.  The game is a bit complicated and works off a different system than the SimCity series did, so I would definitely recommend taking the tutorials.  Cities XL works off a class based system, you have unqualified, qualified, executive and elite residence.  Unqualified workers require much less city services such as education, health, police, etc.   While elite residence require the best of everything which can make your city budget explode.

The class system is the biggest change that Cities XL brings to the genre as well as the best.  I always found in SimCity once you got over the initial hump of starting your city, the game became extremely easy.  With CitiesXL as you grow your city the game actually becomes harder making you really have to watch your budget.

Cities XL also provides mega structures that you can add to your city like the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and other famous structures as well as a blueprint feature where players can create there own mega structures.

Cities XL Trading

Another change is the trading system.  There are about a dozen or so resources you can produce in your city and it needs all of them to be successful.  However it is not possible for a city to actually produce all its resources so you will be forced to trade.

If you are playing solo there is a default corporation you can trade with, however you will not be able to bargain with them as you would with other players in online mode.

While innovative this is where my biggest grip with Cities XL is.

The way trading works is you don’t buy X amount of resources, you create a contract with a player that basically states I pay you $X each month and you give me X amount of resources.  While this doesn’t sound like it’s a big deal, it is.  City resources and budgets are constantly fluctuating which causes contracts to constantly break.

A month in the game is a few mins, so 5 mins from now I might not have the money to keep my contract going.   Contract breaks are not always your fault either.  The other person might not have the resource or money to pay you, so it will break because of them.  As you start getting further in the game you will constantly have the trading window open, which makes the game frustrating.

I would much rather work off a unit system where I buy 500 units of fuel, then once I start to run out I can buy more.  Not as realistic, but much less of a hassle.

Cities XL vs SimCity

Aside from the class system and trading, what separates Cities XL from the SimCity series is that you can build your city in any manner you like.  You don’t have to have industry, office building or huge highways if you don’t want to.  You can create ski or beach resorts, instead of a city, create farm land and provide food to other players.   Become a industrial power house and provide that to other players.  There’s more than one way to create a city with Cities XL which also provides more replay value.

Cities XL Subscription

While you can play the game offline, trading is an important aspect that adds another level to the game, plus it’s just fun to compete with other players.  However the current $9.25/month price is just not worth it in my opinion.  Even at the 3 month price of $6.32 it’s still too high.

Aside from trading and viewing other peoples cities there’s really no reason to pay a subscription fee.  I have yet to chat with anyone in game and most of the time I feel like I am playing a solo game anyway.  The price seems way to high just to be able to trade resources with other players.  I would consider $2/month, but it really should be free.

Overall the game is great, if you were a fan of SimCity your going to love Cities XL.  If you’re not keen on paying a monthly fee you’ll still have a blast playing in solo mode.  Hell you never know, with the recent switch of some MMOs to the F2P model, I wouldn’t be surprised seeing Cities XL as a F2P game sometime in the future.