Cities XL

Cities XL fills in the void left by SimCity, since it turned more attention towards human interaction. Its building and management systems are incredibly varied and complex, giving the player complete control over the city’s growth. And the possibility to share online the whole town with other players in an interactive manner guarantees longevity to the gameplay.

Its friendlier learning curve as compared to the SimCity series will rope in new players, while its greater city design freedom will keep vets interested. However, even with multiplayer trading and resource balance and management, Cities XL is still not as hardcore as the SimCity series, and the subscription cost is questionably worth the arguably shallow multiplayer content.

Finally a worthy city building successor to SimCity 4! The prices for playing online are quite high, though.

Cities XL is the spiritual sequel of Sim City. In the city builder's scene is the real dominator with it's well balanced gameplay and a full 3D graphics.

And while I found the avatars to be quite hideous looking (I opted for a red-afroed freak in grey boots and a red mini skirt), they have little actual bearing on the rest of the game, which looks and feels excellent.

Monte Cristo made nearly everything right what you can expect from a city simulation. A lot of different buildings and styles will entertain you and many other people in the world for hours!

A technically competent city builder that lacks any kind of real depth of gameplay mechanics. There's not much left of a city builder when it's missing many crucial components like a public transport network and infrastructure design. [Jan 2010]

A bewilderingly detailed city-building simulator. [Winter 2009, p.86]

The city-building simulation Cities XL in solo mode certainly makes a lot of fun and motivates to build even larger and more sophisticated cities. The announced features for the online mode are sometimes not available, and also do not always work as they should. A solid game for solo players, fans of the multiplayer mode should still wait for improvements.

On the one hand, it’s a fun, addictive little game that’s a good homage to a classic genre. On the other hand, as of publication there are still quite a few bugs and entire features that just haven’t been implemented yet. Coupled with the lack of a truly competitive element this game will probably only entertain hardcore fans of the genre.

Cities XL suffers from too many preventable faults to be considered a success. It's a shame, since under the surface hides a powerful and creative beast.

Enjoyable city planning but a timid foray into MMO territory. [Christmas 2009, p.100]

Although enjoyable and graphically superb, Cities XL is a derivative, bug-flawed, expensive construction site of a game.

There's work that clearly needs to be done, and if Monte Cristo pull out all the stops over the next few weeks Cities XL might approach something closer to it's true potential than what is currently on offer. As it stands, in it's current state, there's still not enough that justifies repeated visits once the free 7 day trail expires.

If you've got plenty of time to dig in the virtual earth, Cities XL will reward you. [Issue#26, p.52]

Cities XL may appear at the outset to be a detailed and engaging new Sim title, however scratch the surface and you'll discover that it lacks the type of addictive gameplay so necessary in this genre. It might be wise to wait for a content patch before investing too much time in this one.

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?

This game has amazing potential, but sadly at the moment all that they have offered is a shell of what could be, I hope they finish what they started.

More medium than XL. [Christmas 2009, p.77]

A competent, if soulless, city builder with delusions of grandeur. [Christmas 2009, p.90]

Kudos for Monte Cristo for aiming high, however unfortunately they missed that elusive mark with their latest city building game. It does feature some cool micromanagement and even some online features, however it feels like this game should have been something more.

Cities XL plays like Sim City from 1988 of City Life from 2006: Building streets and industrial, residential and commercial areas. But once you start building, you realize that a lot of things don't seem to work - because they only will after you've bought playtime. And only then you will be able to buy extra packages. To be fair, one month is included already.

Cities XL tries to expand the city-building genre with new ideas, but the solo game is generic, and the online features aren't ready for a ground-breaking ceremony.

I've enjoyed myself here, but Cities XL does not live up to its ambitions. The solo city-builder is a well-paced project for those who like to plot boulevards, but the appeal of the larger game remains unresolved.

Cities XL isn’t SimCity, nor is it a revolution for the city building sub-genre, despite Monte Cristo's efforts with the online feature. But Cities XL is a good game for everyone who enjoy these kind of strategy games. Nothing more and nothing less.

The main success of Cities XL is that it has the basics right. The developer has created a solid city builder that's addictive and enjoyable. It's only hampered by the numerous bugs/crashes and the over-priced planet offer that mainly promises more than it delivers.

At the present time Cities XL is an ambitious but incomplete product that will surely need further work from Monte Cristo to reach proper quality standards. The game experience is in fact fun and challenging but also limited in many ways, proving unable to create real commitment from the players.

Intriguing idea but in terms of execution: this ain't no SimCity! [Christmas 2009, p.60]

What if Maxis and Valusoft companies created a game together? Partly brilliant, partly unfinished product pushes you too showily to pay for online features. [Dec 2009]

City XL have some problems, especially the lack of vision and challenge make this game look somewhat unfinished.

If city simming is something that appeals to your obsessive-compulsive tendencies, well, Cities won't disappoint. If, however, you're more interested in creating something that's very much your own and making it part of a world full of similarly unique creations, I'm sorry, but I don't think that'll be happening here.

New content including some game changing modules are promised for future release, but at this point Cities XL is more an intriguing concept than a revolutionary title.

The in-game instructions also leave you dizzy, so Cities XL is really quite impenetrable if you haven’t played something else in the genre. After suffering through the cheesy “inept mayor/smart assistant” shtick of the tutorials I was still left horribly confused regarding basic game principles. Worse, I was bored.