Before I even get started with this review I have to make note that this is my first experience with the Cities series of games. There has been a lot of negative comments with regards to what this game is compared to previous outings, and while it may in fact be terrible in that regard, I can’t make any judgments as this is my first Cities game. I’m sure people will still skewer me in the comments, but I can only review it as the only game in the series because to me, it is.
Cities XXL is a sort of macro city simulation game. Well, it’s hard to really call it a game because as far as I can tell there is no real endgame situation. You just spend your playtime building up a massive city before moving on to create another city. It’s pretty simple in premise, but the execution makes it feel much more complicated that it really needs to be. There is a fine line that these macro simulation games have to walk; make the game hard enough to give it longevity, but make it easy enough for people to be able to pick up and play.
With that being said, let’s start with what I really enjoyed with my time in Cities XXL. Cities XXL is a game that can seem to require a great deal of time to get into, so the fact that it has a full tutorial suite is a plus. It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game that had a dedicated tutorial list, but it’s appreciated as jumping right into the game as a newbie was a humbling experience. The tutorials are laid out in easy to digest chunks that don’t require a lot of time to learn. The use of the Mayor, and you the player as a new intern gives the whole thing the feeling of having a connected story.
Another thing that is really impressive is just how large the scope of the game is. You aren’t just building a little city here, but instead you can create an entire world populated by cities that you have built. It opens up a great deal and even allows you to trade with cities you’ve built. This allows you to create cities with widely different focuses that can feed off of each other with the use of the trade window. The game really gives you the sense that you can keep playing it forever, if that’s your sort of deal. Land is spacious with tons of room to build and manages to put even the latest SimCity to shame in this regard.
One thing that really surprised me was in how you build roads in Cities XXL. I’m strictly a SimCity guy, most notably SimCity 2000 which I still have boxed on the shelf behind me, so I’m so used to building in rigid square shapes with everything sitting on a grid system. Cities XXL challenges everything I know by allowing you to freely form roads in nearly any way you see fit. For much of my initial play I refused to build outside of what I knew, but once I did it opened up a new world of possibilities. This building style also flows into the actual brick and mortar buildings. Since you can build all sorts of wild roads you’ll have to deal with making structures fit within them. This can lead to some groovy city layouts, but you’ll also have to deal with strange empty patches if you don’t plan.
The variety in structures that you can build is also a big plus to the game, and one of my favorite things about it. You can choose from creating small zones that will automatically fill in their respective buildings like most city building games. Residential zones will populate with homes, Commercial lots with businesses, Industry with industry and so on. Where Cities XXL shines is when you choose to build single plot structures. If you don’t want to build an entire zone of random houses, you can pick each individual home and place it by hand. You can (and I did much of the time) design each zone with exactly the building(s) you want. Not only that, but the number of buildings for you to choose from is large and varied so it’s easy to get lost really designing even the smallest of zones and cities.
Since this game can go on and on, you might be frustrated with Cities XXL use of a leveling up system. During regular play much of the user interface will be grayed out forcing you to use the tools the game decides to let you have, when it lets you have them. This makes sense in a story setting, slowly unlocking new building options as your city grows, but after your first city or two you are going to be sick of it. Cities XXL anticipated this and allows you to set the game to expert mode in the options menu before you start. This mode opens up the entire tool-set to the player right from the beginning. I like playing with some computer placed limitations, but there are times when having everything right from the start is a plus, especially for veteran players.
Alright, so I’ve listed a lot of positive things in Cities XXL, but I have to mention the things that put the brakes on a lot of the overall fun. With all the positive notes I made above, you must be chomping at the bit to wonder why I gave the game isn’t heir apparent to SimCity 2000. Well, like I did above, I am going to take things point by point. Fair warning to fans, this may not be pretty.
We start with those tutorials that I mentioned first. Yes, they serve their purpose, but they are a bit misleading to the overall game experience. While they are fun and give a sense of story (I had this idea of building a city under the crappy Mayor, being elected to mayor of my own city, and then showing him how it’s done) the full game does nothing with this premise. I know it might be asking a lot for a city simulation game to have a story, but I felt like the Cities XXL people missed a real opportunity to create goals outside of a free-play mode. It would have been nice to have a reason to play, a reason to unlock new buildings and the like. Instead, we end up with a neat set of tutorials and a lifeless full game that throws out achievements to the player like they were going out of style. How cool would it have been to have to fight with the Mayor about what is best for the city, having to deal with city advisers who will side with you depending on performance.
Now, about those roads? I know I mentioned how cool it was to lay down all sorts of wacky designs, but things go bad really quick. The FPS of Cities XXL slows to a near crawl after only building a few long roads. I have no idea why this happens as the roads are the very first thing you build, but I assume it’s an optimization issue. There are times where I have a decent sized city going just fine and I try to extend a road and things go into turtle mode, but even if I kept the road small the problem would arise to a lesser extent. From what I read it’s that Cities XXL just isn’t optimized correctly and suffers on multiple systems of all sorts of specifications. It’s stated that this iteration of the series features multicore support, but from everything I’ve read and seen, this doesn’t seem to be the case. While I can’t weigh in on it, there is a large portion of the community claiming that this new game runs worse that releases from back in 2009. In a game all about creating large sprawling cites the slowdown when creating long stretches of road is very problematic. If playing within the confines of the regular game this may be less of a problem, but in expert mode where you want to layout massive tracks, things get frustrating.
All this is a shame, but my biggest issues stem from the user interface in Cities XXL. It’s not that things don’t work, it’s just that it all feels very plain and utterly lazy. Icons are tiny and are very difficult to understand without a few goes of the tutorials. I knew coming from the world of SimCity to expect something different, but none of the layouts felt intuitive. I felt like I was navigating through menus in a spreadsheet program more so than playing a game. The entire look of the menus and tools just look so utterly bland and lifeless that it nearly kills the initial experience. They also tend to get in the way and you’ll be stuck waiting for pop-ups to clear out before accessing the menus they cover up. Also, the titles in the options and menus aren’t even centered on their respective icons. It looks more first year game design student than a product done by a real studio.
It’s a hard call to make on Cities XXL. If you are new to this series then you are going to enjoy this game for what it is and has to offer, but if you are a fan of the series you are going to probably hate this iteration, like many in the games forum are. Cities XXL has a lot of great ideas and offers neat play mechanics, but performance issues with regards to building roads (the most important aspect of the game) keep it from moving out of the average game territory and being something special.
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