Growing up, one of my all-time favorite franchises was SimCity. I spent countless hours building and perfecting metropolises, and took some serious pride in my work. So I was pretty excited to hear about Cities XL, which aims to take city-building sims into the online age, with online resource trading and interaction with other players and their cities.

Graphics – The visuals in Cities XL have taken a big leap forward from earlier games. By having a wide variety of building styles and landscapes surrounding your city, you can create some seriously amazing cityscapes.

Easy to Tell What’s Going On - Cities has some pretty extensive and intuitive reporting about things like your economy, employment, pollution, and much more. There’s also a helpful (though sometimes overzealous) status box that tells you when you need to build more housing or add more jobs. If only being a real mayor was this easy!

Less Road Maintenance – Unlike SimCity, when you build new housing or commercial zones, roads automatically build themselves around the zones. While this at first annoyed me because I couldn’t build a nice grid-like city, it’s actually pretty handy and makes managing your town a bit less tedious. Traffic flows well through these roads (at least early on) so you can concentrate on more interesting tasks.

Fluctuating Budget - One thing I noticed early on in Cities is that keeping a reasonable budget can be pretty difficult. Since you’re very limited on what you can build until you reach population levels, it’s tempting to build a bunch of new buildings as soon as you reach the appropriate level. A few times I got overzealous and my available funds started plummeting due to upkeep. I also noticed that my cash flow would fluctuate wildly sometimes, even if I wasn’t actively doing anything. It made it a bit difficult to plan when I was worried that any change I made could be catastrophic to my budget.

Weird, Tiny Controls – Some of the buttons you use for doing common tasks in your city are really difficult to find or read. For example, I don’t think I ever figured out how to save a game manually instead of waiting for an autosave (if this is even possible). Also, once I cranked up the speed of the game, I couldn’t read what speed it was running at, so I wasn’t sure how quickly time was flying by. For a game with some nice visual reporting, some of the task UI left a lot to be desired.

Early Building Limitations - Since you can only really build zones early on, until you hit 5,000 citizens or so, you’ll basically just follow the pattern of: build a residential zone, build a commercial zone, repeat. Everything pretty much needs to be built in a 1:1 pattern, so there’s no real room for creativity early on. Where’s my opportunity to be an irresponsible, mismanaging mayor (like in real government) from the get go?! Once you get further into the game, though, the variety of buildings, zones, and special landmarks you can build are pretty amazing and give you some great incentive to keep going.

Online Play - So far, the online part of the game isn’t nearly as compelling as I’d hoped. The only things you can really do so far are trading resources, which isn’t very exciting or easy to do, and visit other peoples’ cities in a limited capacity. The latter can be kind of cool to see what other people come up with, but you can’t really engage with the city in a meaningful way. Hopefully they’ll beef up what you can do online, especially if they want to charge a monthly fee to do it. Trading resources can be useful (when it works well) but may not be worth the real-life cost for some players.

Solid Citybuilder - Honestly, there’s not much more that needs to be said here. City builders are tough to get right, because they require some delicate balancing, ease of getting started, and satisfying content later in the game. On all of these fronts, developer Monte Cristo has done well. Though they’ve got some kinks left to work out, all in all they’re off to a great start with this game. Fans of other city building games are likely to enjoy Cities XL, as well.

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