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.