Impressions: Cities XL

Format: PC | Genre: MMO/City-building | Publisher: Monte Christo | Developer: Monte Christo | ETA: 08/10/09

By Greg Giddens

With widespread fantasy role-players like World of Warcraft leading the online pack, it’s refreshing to find an MMO with the originality of Cities XL.

City-building and massively-multiplaying might sound an odd combination. But we’ve been playing the beta for a while now, and from what we’ve seen, it looks like it could be a perfect fit.

//Back to school
For many, the bane of management games is how complicated they can be to learn and succeed at. Cities XL, however, is very forgiving in both regards. An intuitive tutorial guides players smoothly through every aspect of city building and management, and those familiar with Monte Christo’s previous release, City Life, or EA’s SimCity series, will find Cities XL’s basic mechanics similar enough to jump straight in and sustain city growth.

The key to this accessibility and general ease of play are the well-designed menus, well-balanced difficulty, and reduced focus on the micro-management found in other such games. The menu layout is simpe yet highly functional, your citizens’ needs are not too pressing, and the management of utilities is much easier than in many previous city building titles. Cities XL allows you to sit back and enjoy the game, rather than concentrating on your city surviving to see the next sunrise.

With learning how to play being so streamlined, you’ll be ready to start your city in no time. You start by choosing which planet to build a city on. Each planet is, in fact, a different server housing thousands of players, but the metaphor proves effective in immersion. After choosing your planet you must create your avatar, the mayor of your city. The standard customisation setup allows you to shape an identity for yourself with slider bars and clothing options – an easy-to-use interface with a surprisingly large scale of uniqueness, but ultimately nothing new in character creation. With your avatar formed, you’ll choose a plot of land out of the thousands available on the planet, each plot with different resources and terrain. Seeing the planet with the countless vacant plots and the countless more occupied really gives you an idea of the scale of this game. It’s a remarkable sight to behold, and your choice in plots can really effect the way you approach the management of your city.

Each plot will have advantages and disadvantages, in terms of how flat the terrain is to build on and which resources are available to extract from the land. Furthermore, each plot has a difficulty indicator in percentage form; the higher the percentage, the harder the task of maintaining a successful city. Choosing the right plot for you is in fact an easy choice: the information about each is displayed with a click on the location or a hover over with the mouse cursor, and there is no irrelevant gumph to over-complicate the decision. You choose which area you want based on the resources you wish to have available to you as standard, and within minutes you’ll be building your first structure.

//Build me up
Building your city in Cities XL is much like you would expect. You have a set amount of money, and you must build your city while maintaining a positive cashflow. This is where the MMO functionality kicks in. Trade is crucial to your city’s prosperity, as regardless of what you extract from your own land, you’ll often find that you are unable to sustain your city using your own resources. So importing and exporting are essential in survival. Every other city on your planet is run by another player, and you must trade with these players to obtain the resources you need. Cities XL continues its intuitive nature with a straight-forward trade system, where players produce tokens from the resources they extract from their own land, and can sell or buy these token in the form of negotiable contracts for the trade of these resources for cash. The trade window will tell you which tokens you have and need, and by simply choosing which resource you’re interested in buying or selling, you’ll be provided with a list of players who are also looking to buy or sell the same thing. It’s then simply a matter of clicking the accept button on the selected offer to begin trade, or setting up your own contract and adding it to the list.

The system doesn’t always work with other players. Depending on the community and its economic state, prices can rise to horrendous levels when you want to buy something, and far too few players are willing to give you a fair price for the token you want to sell. Often, creating your own contracts is the only way to ensure a fair deal, but luckily one company will always be available when times get desperate, and other players can’t, or won’t, meet your needs. Omnicorp is a non-player controlled city, willing to trade all resources for fixed prices, and while they offer little for your tokens and ask too much for theirs, they are still a lot more reasonable than many of the player controlled cities.

[Continues...]

Pages: 1 2