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...]

I love my games big, bold and with as many bells and whistles as can reasonably be attached. I’m the quintessential PC enthusiast, choosing my graphics cards with care and bigging up the likes of Valve whenever I can. Casual gaming does not fit very easily into this mould. As such, the oeuvre of casual gaming kings PopCap, Bigfish and the like would not be something I dabble in very often (with Peggle being the one exception), so I wasn’t expecting anything from Egyptian city builder-lite Nile Online before I opened it in my browser. Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised.

Immortal Cities: Nile Online (to give it its full, unwieldy title) is most definitely a casual game. Knocked out by developers Tilted Mill when they weren’t tinkering with the likes of Hinterland, all you need do to access the game is part with your email address. This modest little package is entirely browser-based, without the need to download anything, which is nice, though it is not entirely free (strictly speaking – I’ll get to that). No sound and minimal animation means it’ll run on just about anything with an internet connection, with the side effect that most of the time it looks and feels like you’re trying to manipulate a screenshot rather than guiding your fledgling settlement to greatness.

Credit to Tilted Mill, the only real barrier that’s between you and actually playing the game is the complete lack of a proper introduction. Even the laziest and most hackneyed products of the casual market take some steps to introduce new players to their superficial workings, but the welcoming party for Nile Online simply points you at the Wiki and buggers off, which can be a little offputting for someone who just wanted to spend their lunch break playing a game instead of reading a wall of text. Thankfully, the Wiki contains a handy step-by-step primer for the game, which I would encourage you to follow. For those of you who won’t, the gist of Nile Online is thus: it’s all about juggling numbers.

You have a few primary resources at your settlement and a set amount of labourers to gather those resources. You need wheat to bake bread to feed your workforce and trade for other resources, clay for bricks and pottery and so on. But you will never, at least in my experience, have enough labourers, so there’s a constant challenge to maximizing efficient production of all your materials. This requires you to reassign your workforce on a regular basis, depending on what it is you’re currently trying to achieve. Want to upgrade your Palace but need some extra pottery? Then you’ll need to pull some men off the fields and into the workshop while keeping an eye on how it affects your farm output. Even at its deepest, you’re just pushing numbers around on papyrus, but in small bites it’s a nice little management morsel.

Everything takes a lot of time in Nile Online too. It’s designed to be dipped into for a few minutes every so often during your day, and harvesting, building and upgrade rates are set accordingly. For instance, it took something like three hours to upgrade my Palace at one point, so all I could do was log in, start the process and log off to do something else. While this slow pace might infuriate someone used to playing a proper strategy or management game, it’s the perfect set up for a casual game that is in no position to put excess demands on your time or attention.

And once you’ve got your settlement sorted and those resources harvested you can trade them with your neighbours once you build a bit of a navy. Or at least, that’s what it says in the Wiki. In practice it’s a little more complicated than that. Each city in Nile Online is run by a different player and will have access to one special resource. In my case it was Oil, which can be used to make Perfume, but only in combination with another special resource called Kohl. If I wanted Cedar, for ships and weapons, or Bronze, for sculptures, I would have to find another player with these who was willing to trade. So to really develop your city past a certain level (every time you level up your Palace requires you to spend certain, increasing amounts of different resources) you absolutely have to interact with the wider community. You’ll have to send them scrolls directly asking for resources or trade on the open market for goods. Suddenly, out of not very much, Nile Online turns itself into a sedate and interesting little co-operative MMO.

There’s even a level above that involving sending armies off to fight bandits with other players for further rewards and access to monument building, but the game is a slow burner and I haven’t had the time to explore that in any depth. Also, while it’s initially free, after a certain level you will have to spend items called Scarabs to continue developing your society. The only way to get more Scarabs is to purchase them with real cash from Tilted Mill, but you’re certainly under no obligation to. The more frugal or less interested player can still enjoy most of the game for free without having to shell out for these microtransactions.

A very slow pace and being easy to dip into make Nile Online a nice little number to distract you every once in a while, on a coffee break or when you find you just can’t stare at that TPS report any more without cracking up. It’s also a great game to tinker with while you’re doing something else (I have it open now watching for a message from a prospective trading partner) and for the cost of absolutely zero earth monies, it’s hard to rubbish the game for its modest ambition and execution. I just wish it looked a little better.

6/10