Should i buy cities xl

But if you never fell in love with this game you won't do so now. If you've never played either of the two previous Cities XL titles this is a much better value proposition and more worth your time — as long as you understand this is a solid — but flawed — title. Cities XL is more of an add-on for the edition. A nice little city builder game, easy to tackle at first, but with a very nice learning curve.

But it's still very light compared to last year's edition, the new things are not that numerous, making it more of a die hard fan acquisition. Cities XL is even less of a complete title than its predecessor was.

When the removal of a core gameplay feature isn't replaced with an effective replacement, what you're left with is a broken game. No effort has been taken to bring C:XL to "" standards in the way of a graphics overhaul, and it still runs like a dog with 3 legs to boot.

User Reviews. Write a Review. Positive: 3 out of Mixed: 16 out of Negative: 14 out of The game is just amazing. I love play this game. For me this game is amazing! Nothing more to comment because this game is amazing! I rate The game is just amazing. Decent graphics and simulation. Decent city and building scaling sizes. Plenty of road options though no freeway options.

The ability of doing Decent graphics and simulation. The ability of doing curved roads is a big plus. However plenty of empty spaces unless you do a perfect grid pattern. There are some options for resource trading that may make some players happy but personally not a big fan of them as they are unrealistic. Decent transit options. You can add mods and new maps but terraforming options are rather limited even with the former. A very annoying aspect with Cities XL is that you have to micromanage everything in order to make people's lives better.

I can understand fire and policing, but hmm, entertainment? That is your responsibility too. Economically wise I found much harder or slower to make meets end especially around middle game than SC4 and much harder than the new SC and while there are mods and cheats available casual players who intend to build large cities may want to be aware of that before they jump in.

The game's menu interface is not very intuitive and suffers from bugs so that you do lose saves from time to time. The game starts to suffer perfomance issues when cities start filling the map as well even on a decent PC. Overall decent game if you are new to the franchise, or if you are new to the city building genre altogether. Trading for anything else, or doing an unbalanced trade, is currently a giant pain in the asphalt.

In order to do a private trade, the first thing you need to do is find the city of the player you wish to trade with. This is more complicated than it needs to be: if the player in question is online and says something in the chat window, then you can just click his name to open the private trade window.

If the player is offline or is not speaking, you have to exit out from your city to the planet overview, then search for his name, then search for the specific city you want to trade with, then click that city, then click the trade button, just to get to the same screen. Why is there no slash-command for that process? Regardless, once you get to the private trade screen, you can select what exactly you want to trade and for what.

A common trade is by resource, so I can trade a player one water token for one electricity token, for example. Trades can be unbalanced, so I could trade my water for your electricity and some cash. Once I make my offer, if the recipient of the game is online, he'll be immediately informed that he has received an offer.

However, the in-game mechanic for accepting or declining profits is completely broken as of this writing; for him to accept the offer, he actually has to Alt-Tab out of the game, log into the Cities XL website, click a link to view all his contracts and offers, click his specific city, click the tab to see the offer, then click either the check button to accept it or the X button to decline then, and then he can Alt-Tab back into his game to keep playing.

It's a massive flaw, obnoxious and pointlessly time-consuming. This will supposedly be fixed in the future, and we are holding out faith that it will be, but know that for now you'll have to pretty much pull teeth to do private trades. It's great that private trades can be accepted on the Internet, allowing you to manage them even while you're not playing the game, but having that as the only way to manage them currently is inexcusable.

Once a trade is initialized, it lasts for only five real-time days. This is important to your city's economy: many players have complained that they make a bunch of contracts on one day, which means they all expire on the same day, and absolutely trash their city's economy as a result. There is unfortunately no way around this: you'll have to prepare for this by renegotiating your contracts early by breaking them and making the same offer, but that will only work if you and your target are online simultaneously and you both know what's going on.

Otherwise, the only thing you can do is stagger when you actually enact contracts, which forces you to essentially play more slowly than you may want to. We suppose that Cities XL was designed this way to encourage player communication, but this was the wrong way to do it.

With trading such an important part of the online component, due to it being damaged if not outright broken , is the game worth the subscription fee? While this is less expensive than a standard MMO, it's still questionable whether the price justifies the fact that all you essentially get is the right to trade resources. We at IGN will take the neutral view here: it's up to each individual player whether the price is justified, and if chat logs are any indication, even the player base is in a heated debate about it anytime the topic is brought up.

Luckily, the game comes with a seven-day free trial so you can make that decision yourself. Beyond trades, there is nothing more you can really do to govern your cities. You can adjust tax rates, but you can only do flat taxes residents or businesses; there is no fine-tuning or progressive tax ability.

Further, there are no ordinances as in SimCity 4, so all your cities are pretty much subject to the same laws, regulating variety strictly to the cosmetic. Online, you can visit other players' cities and check out their architectural designs, but you can't interact with anything. And with that, we can turn to the graphics of Cities XL. The maps, provided you have your graphical settings at maximum and have the rig to run it, are gorgeous.

With certain camera angles as you can see from our screenshots , you can make some beautiful screenshots that look right at home on a city postcard. You get a true sense of scale here, especially because you can zoom all the way in to the sidewalk and actually see just how towering your final buildings are.

Other aspects of the graphics are not quite so well done. The cars and people around the city are cartoony and cute, which isn't a knock against them: it's just a style that not a lot of people will get into. The people especially have a bizarre look about them due to proportions in the face, and the sidewalks feel extremely empty, as you'll only see a half-dozen people max at a time even in a city of millions.

To be fair, rendering people on the sidewalk is essentially pointless, and Cities XL is already a sizable drain on your computer's resources. Cars are rendered in greater numbers to indicate traffic flow and congestion, and they do the job well. The interface is clean for the most part, but several buttons are buried and some have mind-bending icons.

Exiting out of a city involves clicking a button that looks like a planet for Planet Offer in multiplayer, but clicking a button that reads "1P" for Solo Mode in single-player. These are extremely minor gripes, and anyone who spends any time with the game at all will get used to it, but the fact is that it's a bit confusing the first time you see it.

Practically everything in Cities XL relating to conditions is simply color-coded, a very elegant and direct solution to at-a-glance statuses. If the icon for your factories is green, that means it's doing well. If you click a house and the "Employment Satisfaction" line shows a red "light," that means you need more jobs. Very easy, isn't it? Really, the only major concern about the interface is that it alerts you a little too quickly.

You'll often think your city is out of balance: you'll get an alert that you have too many unemployed people, so you build a few industrial zones, then you'll get an alert that there aren't enough workers in the city. But the game doesn't go as deep into the specialization rabbit-hole as SimCity does. You can still build self-contained jack-of-all-trade cities that run independently and don't rely on other cities for imports, as there's plenty of room on the balanced maps for all the resource-production buildings, industries, housing, and services that you'll need to build.

You just have to be careful about where you place them. But not every map will have access to all the resources, and those cities will need to trade in order to offset their natural deficiencies. Food, water, fuel, and "holidays" are all resources that appear in varying amounts on different maps, and they can all be traded.

Some cities can specialize in food or fuel production and export those resources to other cities; while the other city could specialize in building vacation beach or ski resorts in order to export "holidays" without needing to pollute itself with its own food and fuel infrastructure. Other non-map-based items can also be traded, such as industrial goods, electricity, office space, and even workers!

So hypothetically, it's possible to build one city with nothing but houses and shops, and another city with nothing but industry and offices, and the two cities could share everything. These trade mechanics are very abstract and in-tangible. There's never any real sense of your cities being connected to one other, as the abstraction of the trade mechanics maintains a sense of disjointedness for your cities.

You don't have to build specific trade networks with other cities; you only have to build enough city connections to support the total amount of freight that you are exporting or importing.

Every city can trade with every other city as long as the respective cities aren't bankrupt. Even if your city is bankrupt, then there's still the ever-present Omnicorp for you to trade with, which makes the other cities feel kind of unnecessary. Further, insufficient supply of any given tokens doesn't seem to ever have a critical impact on cities.

Maybe when the city gets into millions of population, it becomes a major problem? In the meantime, lack of tokens may limit the profitability of certain buildings, but never to the point that it severely hurts your economy. I've never had a situation in which I backed a city so far into a financial ditch that I couldn't recover. Cities XL really struggles with tone. It can't seem to decide if it's a serious, straight-line management simulator or a tongue-in-cheek city-builder like SimCity.

The tutorial is set up to be one big joke in which you're being trained by the assistant of an incompetent mayor in order to fix his mistakes. But the whole joke falls flat, and the tutorial is an embarassing mess. A couple of the joke reasons for buildings closing can be chuckle-worthy, but it wears thin after a while. Maxis is still the undisputed master of tongue-in-cheek city-building humor, and even Tropico 5 is an order of magnitude funnier than this game.

But it isn't just the failed attempts at humor that cause problems with the game's tone. The graphics are also inconsistent. At a high-level, the game looks like it's going for a satellite-photo quality and looks gorgeous! Buildings and roads are detailed and realistic weak draw distance for cars notwhithstanding. But when you zoom in, the citizens are oddly exaggerated bobble-head characters. It's weird! And even though the building models look good, they're all so bland up close!

Most of the buildings in the game take up the same small square area, and even a lot of the service buildings are this same size. And since service buildings are thinly dispersed across the city, it's very easy for the majority of a city to just be a dull grid of housing and factory zones.

So far, this has all been a review of Cities XL in general. XXL doesn't do much if anything to address the problems that I've talked about above. It does add a couple new features, but they are really small and superficial. The footprint of the interface was reduced a little bit, and was subdued from being bright blue and bubbly to being simple gray, square buttons. All the functionality seems to be identical though, and no new construction options or overlays were added.

The first new feature that I noticed is that the game sometimes would draw weird blue lines between houses. I think that these lines indicate that citizens are moving from one house to another. I guess this could be useful for knowing which areas of town are more or less desirable, since you can see in real time when people move out of their old houses in favor of new houses. But there's already overlays for satisfaction and desirability levels, so this feature seems mostly pointless.

The other new feature is the ability to upgrade industrial buildings to more environmentally-friendly versions. This allows you to somewhat control your pollution levels and gives you a little bit more freedom to build a self-sufficient city in which you can still keep land value and desirability high.

But it's just yet another tedious micro-management feature, as you have to manually click on every, single industrial building one at a time and pay money in order to upgrade it to its eco-version.

The building model doesn't change, and there' no obvious visual indicator that a particular building has already been upgraded, so make sure that you save up the money to upgrade them all in one swoop. If you upgrade them piecemeal, then you'll end up having to click through all the buildings in order to find the ones that you haven't upgraded. The feature also isn't really fun.

Compared to SimCity 's upgrade feature that allows you to customize buildings with extra parts that provide the building with enhanced functionality as well as making the building visually distinct , this is just dull and boring. If there were a way to instantly upgrade your all your industrial buildings in bulk or build new industries with the eco-friendly version from the start , then the reduced tedium might make this feature more worthwhile.

But ideally, such a feature should have different upgrade options available in order to have any value. Maybe if the developers add more variant options, the feature would be better. For example, there could be the standard building, a cheap upgrade to make the building less productive but cleaner, an expensive upgrade that keeps the standard productivity and makes it clean, and an upgrade to make it more productive but dirtier.

This would add some actual strategy to the decision rather than it just being a strict upgrade that you should always do if you have the money.

Another option to improve this feature would be to have multiple upgrade options. Separate upgrades that make the building cleaner, make it more productive, make it consume less water or fuel, and so on would also add some element of strategy and resource management.

But even these suggestions would only exacerbate the problem of not having bulk upgrade capability, and the fact that the upgraded buildings are not visually distinct from their un-upgraded counterparts.

So this feature would need to be completely reworked from the ground up in order to be made viable. This theme of environmental consciousness runs through more of the game, as there are also some new environmental buildings such as an electric car dealership.

I don't remember these being in Cities XL , so I'm assuming they are new. From my experience, they didn't really add much to the game or have much of a mechanical impact. The core mechanical issues prevented me from playing long enough to get any cities large enough that pollution was a severe enough problem to warrant these sorts of measures.

The only time that pollution was ever a problem for me was if I stupidly built my industrial and manufacturing zones too close to my agricultural ones. I did this in one city because it had both fertile land and oil resources in very close proximity, and I didn't plan my industrial expansion very well.

The farms then went out of business because of the air pollution of the factories. Upgrading to the eco-friendly version seemed to only provide only a minimal boost to the farms, and they continued to go bankrupt, rebuild, be productive for a while, and then go bankrupt again. Cities XL was only passably competent on its own. It has enough to like to be addictive at first.

But it's hard to recommend for a purchase due to its proliferation of incomplete, broken, or half-finished features. You can build some impressive, sprawling cities, but it takes a lot of time and is unnecessarily tedious and frustrating to accomplish, even though the actual game is really easy.

Buying XXL is practically paying for the exact same game again. The developers didn't do anything to address the annoying interface problems, nor did they cut the incomplete features or replace them with more fully-realized versions. The couple new features are superficial busts and not even close to justifying the price of a cheap DLC, let alone the cost of a full-priced sequel. If you already have XL and like it, just keep playing that game.

Everybody else can probably pass on Cities XXL as well, unless you're absolutely desperate for a new city-builder. Good review, as much as i saw from it, XXL is basically a 1. Have you tried Cities Skylines yet? Also a new release, and that's a much better city-building experience to me, even with the few flaws it has.

As a matter of fact, I have played Skylines www. All other trademarks and copyright are property of their respective owners. Driven by modded version of B n61n3 d0t N3T 2. Theme by chichian. Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on.

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