Cities XL Review

Conclusion

Cities XL is, as the name might suggest, a game with some big ambitions. The genre is wide open for a next-gen title following EA and Maxis’ apparent departure and Monte Cristo have taken to the task with equal parts enthusiasm, technical skill and unrestrained capitalism. That last one not being so good.

The foundations are certainly there for what could have been a highly entertaining game that (whisper it) could well have supplanted Sim City 4 as the premier city sim. The graphics engine really is fantastic even if the ingame advertising at the very detailed street level grates a little – how many points of revenue does one game need?

Either way, a bustling metropolis from above looks absolutely awesome. Zoom in close and you’ll see caricature citizens going about their business and cars zooming by and, while there’s not a great variety of animations, it all adds up to make your creation feel like a real, living, breathing city.


The awesome graphics are the high point though, and while there have been some innovations along the way like the implementation of curved roads and a varied resource model, they’re poorly supported by the rest of the gameplay around them. What’s the point of curved roads if you can’t have curved buildings?

The actual city building itself, while still appealing and increasingly accessible even to the uninitiated has arguably been over simplified and all too easily results in unimaginative carbon copy blocks of buildings. While late-game options allow you to include monuments and mega-structures, where’s the ability to carve a unique city indicative of your play style? Looking through the array of user created cities online it’s hard to tell any apart.


It’s the damaging of the single player gamer to promote the paid online planet mode that rankles the most though. If you buy a game that doesn’t advertise itself as online only you shouldn’t be at a disadvantage just because you’d rather play solo than with fellow players. Monte Cristo is making it quite clear that you’re heavily disadvantaged if you’re not paying a monthly subscription (despite Cities XL selling at full price) and even then you won’t get access to all the content without paying yet more money. It’s a ludicrous triple pronged business model in which players pay, pay and then pay again and it’s frankly ridiculous to think we shoud lie down and accept it.

While Cities XL shows great potential, a lack of originality and a business plan that borders on ridiculous sully it greatly and as a result reduce what could have been a great game into an expensive and ultimately missable release. If Cities XL were a real place, it’d be Milton Keynes - built with good intentions, but the end result isn't somewhere you'd want to visit for too long.

Score Guide