Cities XL 2012

Discussion in 'Software' started by Nedlamar, Jul 1, 2012.

  1. Nedlamar

    Nedlamar MajorGeek

    For those of you who like city building games.
    I've played many, Sims cities, City life, Caesar's, Grand Ages etc etc etc.

    Cities XL 2012 I picked up on Steam for $9.99, 75% off.
    It's a great game on the whole, free building with much less restrictions of class than most. There are no issues putting lower and upper class together apart from minor environment issues which are easily dealt with.
    The struggle in this game is resources, but that's where it comes into it's own.
    You can build many many cities scattered across the globe, each map with different resources available. Then trade between your cities.
    This makes the game feel more like a world builder than a city builder.
    The road tool works very well, you can even create curved roads which is a wonderful idea. Unfotunately though you cannot upgrade your roads the way I would like, you cannot take a 2 lane road and turn it into a 4 lane highway, you must demolish it first and make sure you have enough width for the bigger road, which if you've built on both sides of the road can mean having to demolish buildings to allow you to build the bigger highway.
    It also lacks the ability to build small road jumping bridges, unless I just haven't found the option yet. To build a 4 lane highway bridge to just jump over a road means you have to build a massive Golden Gate bridge type of structure, which works fine but looks a little odd in places.

    The grid building tool is very intelligent, it will build around structures currently placed which is a wonderful feature, no more having to delete structures to build new ones, you just build around them.

    The micro management is also pretty good, I'm still trying to work out the trade currency as it works on tokens instead of cash, although you have cash flow and buy everything with cash, a certain amount of cash gives you a certain amount of tokens to trade with, which I'm not that keen on, I would prefer just a simple "It costs 100 per turn, you have 200 per turn" type of deal.

    All in all it's a great game, suffers from what seems to be a memory leak which slows it down a fair bit but there is a 20 second reload fix you can use that works fine and keeps the game going.

    If you like city builders then this is definitely worth a shot at the right price.
     
  2. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    Great review of this game Ned and I used to love Sim City and more so the really old A-Train game, so this new incarnation of the Sim City range looks good.
     
  3. Nedlamar

    Nedlamar MajorGeek

    I enjoyed Sim City 3000, sim City 4 I could not get along with, I'm not a neat builder like my good lady, I make money lol, in most city building games I concentrate heavily on getting cold hard cash flowing and then make it look pretty.
    Cities XL gives you the freedom to actually perform both relatively easily simultaneously.
    I'm really getting the hang of it, now creating cities that have little to no resources on the map so careful planning and trade with my other cities is needed, I have 1 city that produces massive amounts of fuel, another that produces massive amount of food, these types of cities supply my holiday resorts which in turn supply the other cities with various luxuries. It's all a complete circle and very enjoyable with little frustration.

    I am however really looking forward to the next installment of Sim City, by the looks of things they are building a genre changing game with technology never before seen, each and every person in the city has an engender, a place to be, a place to go, they kind of sandboxed each person, vehicle and building on it's own to get the city to live and breath like never before. If you haven't already, look into it, it reads like it's going to be very very interesting.
     

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