Cities XL

Hot in the city tonight?

Remember: it's a shot every time you read road, a swig on zones, and finish the whole thing on SimCity.

Cities XL is the latest release for the PC from French developer Monte Cristo in a genre that I had thought had all but gone extinct years ago the City Builder / Mayor Simulation category. Its been twenty years since the granddaddy of it all SimCity (sorry kids might as well get the party started) came out, and six years since the fourth sequel.

Watch some of the gameplay videos of Cities XL and youll be forgiven for mistaking it for SimCity (dont drink and drive, children), as its typically isometric overhead view of a city, laying roads (Salut!), setting up city utilities, balancing industry and residential sectors and designating usage zones (do try and eat something, wont you?) will all look very familiar indeed. This is far from being a shortcoming in Cities XL, as the requirements of the genre and the seminal nature of its progenitor means that theres simply not much getting away from visual and mechanical similarity. This can definitely be considered borrowing from the best rather than simply being derivative, and it will be the subtle balances and small innovations that Cities XL brings with it that will be the making or undoing of it.

Cities XL gets its essentials right, and as far as interface and base city building is concerned its a friendly and typically straightforward system. Playing through the tutorials to introduce you to each button and feature will take a sedate forty minutes. SimCity (Skoal!) was guilty in its introductory stages of feeling like it should have included Joint Honours in Economics and Civil Engineering on the requirements section of the box. Cities XL does its best to colour co-ordinate most of its interface and feedback, with anything green being a good and happy thing, anything red being a problem to consider, and anything in yellow representing a system or area of influence.

In building the city, the player will no longer have to mess around with water pipes and overhead power lines, but instead will usually only be required to build all-in-one utility depots every so often. Cities XL treats roads (this site encourages you to drink responsibly) as the backbone of the development, and laying down the main thoroughfares will automatically web the intervening spaces with by-roads and alleys to keep everyone connected. Rather than the stuffy old grids, roads and routes can be made in curving loops and corners, snaking between designated waypoints in a way that will make your town look a lot more authentic, like it grew up naturally over time. This is a lot of fun, until you realise that in terms of successful gameplay its a terrible idea what you want as a Mayor will be clean distribution and brute efficiency and for that youll want your sheep/drones/slavish-mass/constituents in a network of battery farmed cubicles. This will inevitably be the way of these games until your PC can actually appreciate and reward elegance or scenic value at which point Im John Connor and if youre listening to this, You Are The Resistance.

Despite your endeavours being effectively restricted to a grid system, the buildings that pop up as your mandated zones (Chin Chin) populate look good. There is a definite sense of reward when the first building for a higher class of citizen or fancy industry pops up. The restrictions imposed in the regular modes of Cities XL are not entirely unwelcome, stopping the player from making some early mistakes. Many of the zones (youre not working tomorrow, are you?), utilities, and constructs will not be available to the player until their city is of such size as to sustain them forcing you to start from low density housing and unskilled industries; stopping you from tanking its economy by building a sports stadium before you have the money to support it. This restriction can actually be removed by playing in a different mode, but quite why the option to suicide your city at any given moment is a plus is unclear.

Where Cities XL tries to stand out from its peers is by its treatment of resource management, online play and plug-in additions. Rather than just setting up the fundamentals of the economy and letting your little virtual industrialists get on with it, Cities XL requires you to actively get involved with the trading routes with other cities. After a certain point of development, your industries will require you to establish trading deals with foreign powers if you want to develop any further. In the single player offline mode this will be through the faintly sinister OmniCorp, trading utility resources (water, electricity, etc) for cash. The system is simple enough, but to be honest, really adds little to the gameplay experience. It is too simple a set-up to please the micro-economic management aficionados, and too much of a distraction from being an All Mighty Omniscient Mayor and Builder Of Things for the regular player.

However, take your city online and suddenly this system is given an entirely new aspect you can now conduct tedious, ham-fisted trading with other live players across the world. Its just like being boring but on the internet! Monte Cristo advertises that each online server will contain up to ten thousand cities, all of which will contain a mayor equally as uninspired as you, trying to rip you off for the price of an Electricity Resource token. Think of the World Of Warhammer auction room system, but with economists instead of orks. The whole online resource feature would be easy enough to tolerate or ignore if there wasnt a monthly subscription charge for the privilege. The slightly irksome sense of being fleeced for features that should have been included is compounded by the need to separately purchase Game Extension Modules, if and when Monte Cristo actually releases them.

The concept of GEMs seems interesting and would have certainly gone a long way into setting it apart from the competition and breathing life into your beloved city. The GEMs allow you to quit the Mayors office and enter into the city and micro-manage businesses as a separate game. The publicity gives the example of running an individual business, or even a larger concern like a ski resort or a yachting marina. At time of writing these were not yet published, but they had better be pretty darn good if you have to pay for each GEM separately. The integration between the Mayoral and Micro-Management GEM layers of the game will have to be carefully done and actively rewarding, otherwise the gamer will be better served by having Cooking Mamma on the DS to hand and pretending youre inside that little restaurant you just built.

Cities XL has got the city-building basics spot on, and by far the most fun you will have is just playing around with the building blocks when you do not have the constraints of goals or budget to worry about. The economics and civic mechanics are all straight forward enough to understand, and the interface is intelligently designed, but they lack any real innovation or nuance that you havent already seen elsewhere. Once your city is established the actual challenge becomes nothing more than to wait until your citizenry asks for something, build it, wait till they ask for something else repeat adinfinitum. The additional charges to access game features that seem like they should be included seems just a little craven, especially given how little the much vaunted online functionality actually adds to your gaming experience. Cities XL performs all the basics admirably, and gives a friendly and enjoyable city building experience. If your system has the clout,the graphics can also be excellent, showing the player impressive urban vistas when you pan the camera low, and jolly cartoon citizens going about their business in full zoom. 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?

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By Duncan Lawson