The release a new version of XL Cities every year, they done so since it was an MMO and when it failed to take off they turned it in to a single player game and it looks good.. Trouble is it has a serious memory leak which has existed for many years now. It causes the game to crash just as your city starts to grow, often taking your saved games with it so you lose everything. This issue has been in the last 3 versions of the game, probably more and it has never been fixed but affects everybody who owns the game. Typically each new version comes with a few new buildings, which is good, existing users typically get a 50% discount on the upgrade which is also good. But what is the point if you cannot actually build the sort of cities you see in the videos because of an unfixed memory leak...

This game is only playable for a short time so it gets a 1 from me. I have owned very version of this game since it was first released... but enough is enough.… Expand

It's the same game as XL2012. A couple new addons, hardly worth the money.
It features the same horrible lag issues as the previous versions.

I would stay away from this, and treat it like the plague!

It is all true that cities Xl have memory leaks and only use a single core. However, I have to disagree with negative opinions posted here. Despite the problems the game has almost cult-like following and there are many reasons for that. Pros:
- Vibrant online community (XlNation.net) provides hundreds of add-ons, mods and fixes
- Memory leak issue is simply circumvented by periodic restarts of the game (go back to the menu and load the city again)
- I have built cities of up to 2.5 million using this simple trick.
- While it only uses a single core, my Athlon II X4 635, 4gb RAM, HD 7750, which is an economy rig handles it just fine with medium-high details.
- nice and complex simulation of traffic, quality of life and transport
- you can build truly beautiful stuff:
http://xlnation.net/content/new-coast-city
http://xlnation.net/content/tayra
http://xlnation.net/content/seaside-city
http://xlnation.net/content/scalabis

Here is an example of a city with 15,000,000 inhabitants built despite the memory leak issue:
http://xlnation.net/content/empire-jet-city

Cons:
- memory leak
- uses a single core
- no feature of filling a zone with single type of a building… Collapse

Cities XL Platinum (bought via Steam) is a tough game for me to rate, I don't have any of the crashing or errors I've seen mentioned here at other sites. However, I'm not really impressed with it as a sim-game. Lot of neat details, things to do that improve on SimCity4 yet, it feels half-baked, not very deep, and/or at least kind of indie-ish, despite this being 2nd/3rd iteration of the line. Only played 8-hours so far, but keeps you busy until the next SimCity release … Expand

This game is a crap! The mechanics of the cities does not work. The trade system between cities does not work either. It seems that the game was released unfinished.

Graphically excellent. Easy to learn. Manual is appalling for a game where you need to understand what's going on inside the system to do well. Game soon becomes repetitive and limited. The problem is that the internal systems are fairly basic. This is NOT Sim City. If Sim City is champagne, this is beer in a pretty package. Fun for an evening or two, but no more than that.

It isn't all that bad. You can buy it 85% off on steam if you own and old version (2011 or 2012), so you can quickly catch up on new developments. What's good in it: you get much bigger maps than in SimCity (huge, at 50,0000 citizens you have barely covered 10% of the map, so there is a potential to grow). Nice zoom you can get to street level and look up at your city. Plenty of maps. Living economy (specialize your cities and trade). Very good zoning tool
What it is bad/missing: it is a memory hog, does crash from time to time, lack of self developing zones (density growth, but on the other hand you have control over the city and the looks of it).… Expand

I have 10 years of experience playing city simulation games, Simcity 2000, Simcity 3000, Simcity 4, Simcity Societies, City Life, and Now Cities XL Platinum. During the time period and technologically era, Sim City 4 had to be my favorite. I was planning on getting the new SimcIty (2013 Version) but I heard it was completely f**ked up, It was going to be a great game but EA ruined it. Cities XL platinum, does have a ton of space to make your city very large, it's easy to manage a city in a small size but get harder as you increase its size but then that creates more gpu usage. After about 13 hours of game play it crashed twice. The game has decent graphics, can be addicting and see your whole city that the size of New York,, the game automatically saves and you have a low chance of losing your progress. When i play the game, it sounds average to me. Basically I think the game is better than Simcity as of now but still Cities XL Platinum still has some issues but I can recommend this game to anyone that are fans of City Simulation Games that quit Simcity from all the problems it's having. Not as fun as the old simcity where it had it's disasters but still good with it.… Expand

Piece of crap. The sad thing is that the bugs present in this version HAVE NOT BEEN FIXED in 3 different versions 2011, 2012 and Platinum (I owned 2011 and upgraded to platinum for $5 with the hope they made the game more stable). I got it on Steam and their forums for this game are full of complaints about crashes instability. There is also a petition to ban the developer for repeatedly releasing "new" crap versions of this game with the same bugs. For example: Game crashes frequently during saves; game crashes if 'Escape' or other keys are pressed when certain cub-menus are open; many buildings don't have a title or description, but instead will say something like &123_title or &123_desc as if they forgot to replace string placeholders with actual text (wow... QC anyone?); and lots of small issues, like buildings getting randomly disconnected from roads (and having to be rebuilt), road junctions getting messed up completely when new branches are added, and decorations that flatten large sections of the terrain when placed.… Expand

i own and play just about every city sims/builders that is out there this is great game, loads of fun, runs great, have played it for hundreds of hours. if you go to xlnation.net you will find hundreds of mods for it, everything imaginable and a very active community over 40,000 members! there is no serious memory leak or programming issue like some people are posting. what issue that people are having is that the game allows you to build huge i mean huge cities, ive seen some with population over 90M and basically they do not set limits other than the hardware you have. so as you add more and more builds and roads and the cities get larger and more complex sure its going to use more and more memory until you run out of memory and until your cpu/gpu cant handle the size of the cities and complexity you are building. It's hard to put in words just large and complex your cities can get, they can look so real that you can't distinguish screenshots from real world images of some of the worlds largest cities. in fact i cant think of a real world single city that has a population of over 90M. so what you have a people with low end hardware trying to build cities they can't support. and since its a 32-bit application, like most games, the cities can only get so large and complex before you hit the 2-3gb limit that windows imposes. the trick is to balance city size and complexity and not try to build cities that don't make sense and would not be practical even in real life.

so yes the game is a 32-bit game with the game logic running in a single thread, but most other games out there have the same limitations. the only difference between those games and this game is that this game does not impose limits on you like simcity or tropico or anno does. also this games lets u pack the density of the cities to real world levels and beyond. in this way its more a city builder than a sim i would say.… Expand

This can very well be the new SimCity if the performance issues are addressed. A bit disappointing to see the electric boogaloo (ie a sequel with minimal new features). However, this game still beats SimCity, there's a lot of things to do and traffic problems can actually be resolved. The performance is an ongoing issue, even with high end machines you will end up with super low frame rate after 30 mins of playing. Overall, the contents are good, the performance are bad. Would be good if this game can use IRISZOOM like Wargame:European Esclation… Expand