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Update: Mark Harrison, February 2009:
Monte Cristo has announced that they are closing the online elements of Cities XL. You can, of course, continue to play offline. There are plans to relaunch the planet offer as part of a new 2011 edi |
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| A review of: Cities XL by: Blaze |
| Platform: PC | Publisher: Monte Cristo |
| Rating: 8.0/10 |
Update: Mark Harrison, February 2009:
Monte Cristo has announced that they are closing the online elements of Cities XL. You can, of course, continue to play offline. There are plans to relaunch the planet offer as part of a new 2011 edition of the game, but for now, no online play is available.
I have fond memories of City Life - Monte Cristo's single player city building game, which was released back in 2006. City Life offered a deeper, more engrossing city building experience than the average city sim. You weren't just trying to build a large, successful city, you were trying to make one that the citizens enjoyed living in. Trying to keep your snobby 'Elites' happy while at the same time ensuring that your 'Have Nots' didn't bring down the tone of the neighbourhood was challenging, sometimes stressful, and always entertaining.
Cities XL takes City Life and builds on it to offer a multiplayer experience. The basic idea is the same kind of thing. You pick a location for your city, connect it up to the outside world, and start building. To begin with, you only have access to some basic pollution producing heavy industries and unqualified workers, but as your population grows you get access to new industries - such as offices that produce IT services, and you can attract qualified workers, executives, and elites.
Each population type has different wants and needs, and the industries work together. For example, heavy industries need office workers, offices need hotels. Hotels want qualified workers, and those qualified workers want somewhere to go shopping. The shops, of course, need unqualified workers to man the tills.
As you would expect, unqualified workers don't want too much. They are fairly tolerant of pollution, and don[t demand too much in the way of schooling, law enforcement, or entertainment. As you move up the social ladder, however, your citizens become increasingly demanding, so you will need to build more schools, police stations, and other facilities to keep them happy.
Managing your finances in the game can be tricky. You need to get the right balance between taxation and services. All buildings cost money to produce and maintain - even roads. If you get your road network wrong at the start of the game, demolishing and re-building it with bigger, more efficient roads can be an expensive proposition. Your citizens will quickly become very unhappy too. Just like real life! Take too long over your road works, and the companies that are cut off while you're replacing their roads could go bankrupt.
Another thing you need to manage is production. Your businesses need freight, electricity, water, etc. Some of these things will be available on the map you're playing, others may not be, so you will need to trade with other players to sustain your economy at the higher population levels. In single player, you have to trade with the computer-ran OmniCorp, in multiplayer, you can trade with other players who should offer much better prices.
Performance and graphics
CitiesXL runs well on a wide range of PCs. If you have a low end computer, you'll have to run the game in low or medium graphics mode. In this mode, the game has decent enough graphics while you're zoomed out and playing in your typical city builder view. If you zoom down to street level, though, the cars and people in your city are displayed simply as blocks.
On higher end PCs you can turn the detail up, and it's then that the game really comes into its own. You can watch people walking the streets - playing basketball at your local court, or carting at the local track. There are lots of different animations for different kinds of building, and you can spend a lot of time hopping around town checking up on your citizens.
The world feels vast. I was impressed with the way you choose where your city goes on the Planet Offer. You can scroll around a globe, and zoom in and out looking at different continents until you find an available spot to place your city. Different maps have different difficulty levels, and different resources available. If you want to 'live' near to a friend, you can search for their city name, and place your city at an available spot next to theirs, instead of having to click / hover over each city to see who owns it.
The servers for the Planet Offer were quite busy when I did the review, and disconnections / lag was a little bit of a problem. Monte Cristo have since opened new servers, and that does seem to have reduced the lag somewhat.
GEMs and Megastructures
The thing that sets Cities XL apart from a standard city building game is the extra game elements. Megastructures are huge landmarks that take vast amounts of resources to build, and make a city unique. The blueprints for Megastructures are given out via a lottery system, and blueprints can be traded between players, so if you really want a certain blueprint you can barter for it. If you have a blueprint, and don't do anything with it, the game will offer the blueprint to another player. This prevents hoarding of blueprints by a select few players.
Megastructures take a lot of resource tokens to build, so if you decide to build one, you will need to trade or purchase resources to keep your city ticking over, and complete the construction. The structures offer benefits such as increased traffic or tourism, as well as the prestige of having something that other players don't.
GEMs are "Gameplay Expansion Modules". At the time of writing, the first GEM hasn't been released yet. GEMs will cost real life money to buy, but Planet Offer subscribers will get a discount on them. Each GEM will introduce a 'game within the game' - for example the Ski Park GEM will be like a mini Ski Park Tycoon game.
The GEMs will benefit your city, but some of them will be quite large, and as such you will have to make sacrifices in order to get enough room to put the GEM in your city.
I love the idea of GEMs, but at the moment, it's just an idea. I'm eager to get my hands on one, and will update this review when the first one comes out.
Single Player
You can play Cities XL single player, however you still need to have access to an internet connection, as the game requires you to authenticate with it's servers once a month. This is something I dislike a lot, since I live in a rural area, and the internet connection is very flaky. I'm a hardcore MMO gamer, and I'm likely to turn to the single player version of Cities XL to while away the hours when the net connection has died. Having to remember to authenticate every few weeks 'just in case' is rather irritating.
The single player version of the game is more limited than the Planet Offer - being unable to trade between your cities can make things more difficult, and there are transport options that are Planet Offer only. Even with those limitations, the single player game is still engrossing.
Overall
Overall, I'm very impressed with Cities XL. The Planet Offer is inexpensive - if you subscribe for three months or more, then the cost is a lot lower than most traditional MMOs. The fact that the game pauses automatically after a period of inactivity means that you can have it running in the background while you're working, and just build the odd building here and there whenever you have the time.
The graphics are very nice, and the ability to explore your city - and even take your own avatar down into the city to meet other avatars is a brilliant touch that really makes your city come to life. I run three cities (you are allowed to run more, but three is all I have the time and motivation to keep track of), and each one has its own feel and personality.
I'd like to see some more focus and goals for the single player game, but the multiplayer is a lot of fun. As a competitive, PVP loving MMO gamer, Cities XL won't be becoming my main MMO, but the low subscription cost means that I'm happy to play it as a secondary game - I like to nip in on a morning while I'm drinking my coffee.
I'm very much looking forward to the GEMs. As long as MonteCristo release a gem every few months, I think that Cities XL will enjoy a place on my hard drive for a long time to come.
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