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CITIES XL

EMAIL PRINT pc

4.1 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 32 critic reviews
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Based on 89 votes
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Game Info

Publisher: Monte Cristo

Developer: Monte Cristo

Genre(s): City-Building, Simulation

Players: Thousands

ESRB Rating: RP (Rating Pending)

Release Date: October 9, 2009

Summary

CITIES XL allows gamers to develop cities on realistic 3D maps using an incredible collection of unique structures and monuments based on American, Asian and European-influenced architectural styles. The maps feature a variety of environments: mountains, hills, canyons, beaches and islands, all set in different climates from tropical to desert, Mediterranean to temperate. Players must create the right combinations of social services, leisure activities, special events and other job opportunities within their cities in order to feed, clothe, employ and entertain their citizens. Be it planning and building a new zoo, public park, residential neighborhood or transit system - there's always a fresh and exciting challenge for would-be city managers and mayors in CITIES XL. The game's online features and services allow players to create interconnected cities on virtual and persistent planets. Mayors can share and trade with one another, specialize their economy and team up with befriended cities to create sprawling metropolises. Life on the planet is punctuated by events and competitions - a concert held in one town may, for example, be attended by visitors from other areas who can also enjoy a walk around the city to admire the urban creations of multiple players. By combining a fantastic single-player game with the social and multiplayer aspects of an MMO, CITIES XL shapes the future of the genre by offering more variety, bigger cities and multiple gameplay layers. [Monte Cristo]

Also On The Web: Official Website

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Multiplayer.it

Cities XL is a fresh and innovative game. It is graphically beautiful and full of interesting features that set it to the top of the genre. Unfortunately there are some issues with the online.

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GamesNation

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.

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IGN

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.

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Cynamite

Finally a worthy city building successor to SimCity 4! The prices for playing online are quite high, though.

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Everyeye.it

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.

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NZGamer

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.

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GamingXP

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!

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Games Master UK

A bewilderingly detailed city-building simulator. [Winter 2009, p.86]

Gamers.at

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.

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Strategy Informer

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.

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Gamer Limit

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.

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PC Gamer UK

Enjoyable city planning but a timid foray into MMO territory. [Christmas 2009, p.100]

PC Games (Germany)

Although enjoyable and graphically superb, Cities XL is a derivative, bug-flawed, expensive construction site of a game.

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Total PC Gaming

If you've got plenty of time to dig in the virtual earth, Cities XL will reward you. [Issue#26, p.52]

AceGamez

There's work that clearly needs to be done, and if Monte Cristo pull out all the stops over the next few weeks Cities XL might approach something closer to it's true potential than what is currently on offer. As it stands, in it's current state, there's still not enough that justifies repeated visits once the free 7 day trail expires.

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Play.tm

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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Gameplanet

Cities XL may appear at the outset to be a detailed and engaging new Sim title, however scratch the surface and you'll discover that it lacks the type of addictive gameplay so necessary in this genre. It might be wise to wait for a content patch before investing too much time in this one.

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GameFocus

This game has amazing potential, but sadly at the moment all that they have offered is a shell of what could be, I hope they finish what they started.

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PC Zone UK

More medium than XL. [Christmas 2009, p.77]

PC Format

A competent, if soulless, city builder with delusions of grandeur. [Christmas 2009, p.90]

ImpulseGamer

Kudos for Monte Cristo for aiming high, however unfortunately they missed that elusive mark with their latest city building game. It does feature some cool micromanagement and even some online features, however it feels like this game should have been something more.

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GameStar

Cities XL plays like Sim City from 1988 of City Life from 2006: Building streets and industrial, residential and commercial areas. But once you start building, you realize that a lot of things don't seem to work - because they only will after you've bought playtime. And only then you will be able to buy extra packages. To be fair, one month is included already.

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PC PowerPlay

Intriguing idea but in terms of execution: this ain't no SimCity! [Christmas 2009, p.60]

LEVEL (Czech Republic)

What if Maxis and Valusoft companies created a game together? Partly brilliant, partly unfinished product pushes you too showily to pay for online features. [Dec 2009]

Eurogamer Italy

At the present time Cities XL is an ambitious but incomplete product that will surely need further work from Monte Cristo to reach proper quality standards. The game experience is in fact fun and challenging but also limited in many ways, proving unable to create real commitment from the players.

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Boomtown

The main success of Cities XL is that it has the basics right. The developer has created a solid city builder that's addictive and enjoyable. It's only hampered by the numerous bugs/crashes and the over-priced planet offer that mainly promises more than it delivers.

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GameSpot

Cities XL tries to expand the city-building genre with new ideas, but the solo game is generic, and the online features aren't ready for a ground-breaking ceremony.

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Eurogamer

I've enjoyed myself here, but Cities XL does not live up to its ambitions. The solo city-builder is a well-paced project for those who like to plot boulevards, but the appeal of the larger game remains unresolved.

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Gameplayer Sweden

Cities XL isn’t SimCity, nor is it a revolution for the city building sub-genre, despite Monte Cristo's efforts with the online feature. But Cities XL is a good game for everyone who enjoy these kind of strategy games. Nothing more and nothing less.

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1UP

If city simming is something that appeals to your obsessive-compulsive tendencies, well, Cities won't disappoint. If, however, you're more interested in creating something that's very much your own and making it part of a world full of similarly unique creations, I'm sorry, but I don't think that'll be happening here.

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GameShark

New content including some game changing modules are promised for future release, but at this point Cities XL is more an intriguing concept than a revolutionary title.

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Gaming Nexus

This is a solid city builder in the SimCity line with a clean interface and good underlying mechanics. The online parts, which the developer hopes to use to set it apart, require more work and thought.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this game is 4.1 (out of 10) based on 89 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Harle gave it a3:
I was really looking forward to this game, but it's been a pretty big disappointment. Granted, the game lets you build some very attractive cities, but in terms of gameplay, it fails in a number of ways. My two biggest complaints are that the online multiplayer mode is essentially blackmail. It doesn't offer anything at all that warrants a subscription fee; being able to trade and visit other people's cities(without any gameplay value there) does not warrant a monthly fee. There are plenty of interesting ways in which cities could have interacted, but the best they could do was trading resources, which I'm not sure why they couldn't have simply offered as a standard, no-fee feature. And because they have nothing to offer multiplayer players that's new or interesting, instead they have handicapped solo players arbitrarily by forcing them to use a totally broken trade system. They force you to deal with 'Omnicorp' with whom you buy and sell at a 1/4 loss. One token sold to them is worth 2500, while buying a token from them is 10000, and at a city of 500,000, you are going to end up so deep in the red with resources that your city will be abysmal. Any other game would have allowed you to at least trade between your own solo cities, encouraging building multiple cities with different resources to trade and balance out. But again, because multiplayer doesn't offer anything but trading, solo play is arbitrarily handicapped. The result is that the only worthwhile maps in solo mode are the ones with the widest variety of resources, as having a large amount of resource A doesn't make up for having to buy resource B, C, D, and E from Omnicorp. So this renders a number of the maps pointless save for the sake of variety, if you don't mind kneecapping yourself. The only thing that the Planet Offer gives you is new buildings and new features. This could have(and should have) been done with DLC, like every other sane business plan. I would have happily continued paying reasonable DLC charges for new content, but I will not pay a monthly fee just to avoid having a handicapped solo game. I'm not that much of a sucker. So more than any other game I have ever played, I feel ripped off, taken advantage of, and lied to. This game exists to snub you if you don't give them a monthly fee, for a game that has absolutely no business being a subscription-based game. Nevermind that the game is unfinished, buggy, and has a building UI that, while capable of creating some pretty cities, can be extraordinarily frustrating when roads are placed just a pixel too close so that you can't place a structure, and roads that try to snap to positions that don't make sense, etc, etc, etc, etc. Until they change their entire system and back down from this subscription fee thing, this is not a game worth getting unless you're fine with paying monthly fees for single player games.

WB AU gave it a0:
I only play in Solo mode and, after buying the game, found out that solo mode players will not be able to get new content - ever (according the MC Support). IMHO, this game is a complete turkey and future MC games, of any genre are off my to-buy list.

StoNe D gave it a3:
This is on the market as a single player game with a subscription online component, so it should be reviewed accordingly. This game lacks far too much content single player, to the extent that it is buggy and broken. I gave it a 3 because the free zoning is nice, and graphics are ok. But the gameplay is epic fail.

Majestic P. gave it a2:
Feels more like a CAD program than a game. In the SimCity series I always felt like my city was a living breathing organism. The sims were going about their daily lives and it was my job to look after them and give them a nice place to live. I feel absolutely no connection with the city I'm building in Cities XL. There are no advisors, disasters or street level sound effects, and all the buildings seem generic. No graphs, no mass transit, no newspaper headlines, no saving up for a museum and feeling sorry for your citizens when you can't afford to keep it. It does have a few good ideas for reducing the more tedious micromanagement in SimCity 4 -- like the school bus funding radius -- but the whole thing feels too soulless to be any real fun. If I had just wanted to place 3D buildings and draw angled roads I would have downloaded Google SketchUp and saved myself the 50 bucks.

Aaron S gave it a4:
Graphics fairly nice, though items seem a bit place without SC4-like props. Only a few tile sizes, all square and mostly 2x2ish. NO ambient sound at all, just UI/music. Can't find any GEMs. UI seems a bit clumsy compared to SC4/SC3. Seems fairly unfinished :/

CityBuildfan fan gave it a0:
Hmmm, even if you shelled out 50 odd dollars for this game, you're still shafted. There is no full transportation system, utilities (like energy, water treatment), terraforming, way too damn simple, unintuitive GUI, and on and on. SC4 is much more superior in every way (with the exception of graphics). And yet, Monte Cristo hits you with ingame ads/sale pitches to make you go and get a subcription service to gain access to more content that should have been in the game in the first bloody place. To top in all off, it's buggy. They had more than a freaking year to develop the game. It is a rushed pre-beta in my eyes. It's a crap game. Don't even torrent it. It really is not worth it. At all.

C S gave it a3:
Good screenshots. That's where the compliments end. The "tutorial" alone has enough bugs to turn you off. Simple actions like building roads and zones become frustratingly complicated. No custom content and you have to pay to connect to other gamers. the Sim City Box is $30 cheaper, you don't have to pay to connect to other players and the user-generated content is free for download. Sim City 4 FTW.

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CITIES XL

Game Info

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What The Critics Said

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