Developer: Focus Home Interactive
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Genre: City Building Sim
Players: 1
Console Reviewed: PC
Progress: Mayor of White Beach (population 50,000)
If you’re really into city building games, there aren’t a lot of choices out there. The genre is dominated by only two main series, and often fans must wait many years between new games. Cities XXL hopes to satisfy the dream some people have of being mayor of their own city and fill in the gap while we wait for the next big city building revolution. It would be unfair not to judge Cities XXL on its own merits, but it would be irresponsible if I didn’t at least make some comparisons to the longstanding king of the city building simulator known as SimCity. As perhaps the only high-profile alternative to SimCity, Cities XXL aspires to match them in some ways and tries its hardest to surpass them in others. Does Cities XXL succeed in being a great sim in its own right? Read on to find out.
My expectations were moderately high as I began to dive into Cities XXL. I’ve played nearly all of the SimCity games over the years and each one has advanced the technical complexity of the genre. With that in mind, I expected Cities XXL to be a competent city building sim that was simple and intuitive to learn, but complex enough to provide flexible control over the development of my city. Most of all, I wanted a change of style from the frustrating difficulty of SimCity, where the needy complaining citizens are notoriously hard to please. Well, imagine my surprise when my expectations were met in spades as Cities XXL delivers a decent, yet not groundbreaking entry into the genre. While it has its annoying quirks, the important thing is that the game runs pretty well and doesn’t force you online. While borrowing a lot of similarities from SimCity, Cities XXL is just different enough to be a whole new experience.
I was pleased to discover that Cities XXL operates on a completely different philosophy from SimCity. SimCity severely limits the size of cities you can build and requires you to build small discrete cities across a larger region. You must give your cities specializations and get them to work together to trade goods and people. The result is a disjointed experience where you find yourself constantly jumping back and forth between cities, attending to one city’s specific needs while time apparently stands still for the others. Cities XXL thankfully throws that idea out the window. Cities XXL lets you choose among a variety of truly enormous maps ripe for development, and gives you all the tools and space necessary to make your city formidable and self-sufficient. It is truly mind-boggling just how large cities are allowed to grow and so Cities XXL certainly lives up to its name. This is how a city building game should be, large enough to let you shape the city of your dreams rather than constantly worrying about abutting against the city limits. While people are entitled to their individual tastes, I personally prefer the approach that Cities XXL has chosen to take.
Cities XXL is daunting at first, but after running through the tutorials, I got a much better sense of how to go about building a city. Luckily it’s not that hard to convince citizens that your city is an attractive land of opportunity. Almost as soon as I added roads with basic utilities and zoning, the city started growing. The lots I had zoned filled up quickly as people moved in to build houses. Then my new citizens started demanding places to work and shop, so I built a huge industrial sector and inserted some retail along the highway. Then suddenly my city attracted more discerning, higher-skilled workers and executives who suddenly required health-care, education, and police protection. My hands were flying on the keyboard and mouse as I was working hard trying to keep up with demands for more services and for more space for homes and industries. I thought that I was seriously stressing my budget, but money never seemed to be a limiting issue. I didn’t have to wait long for tax revenue to fill my coffers, so I started making high-capacity freeways to accommodate high-density development and more city services. Before I knew it, several hours had slipped away and I marveled at the city I created. Cities XXL gameplay is much more exciting and fast-paced than SimCity, and it doesn’t make you slog through hours of waiting for your tax base to grow. Once I got used to the menus and features, I knew where to look for city stats to make sure things were running smoothly. Overall, the act of playing Cities XXL is a satisfying experience.
While not as crisp and clean as SimCity, the graphics in Cities XXL are surprisingly detailed and the maps are beautiful. Zooming in to ground level I couldn’t help but to be impressed by the high attention to detail seen throughout my city. There were trees lining the boulevards, brick textures on buildings, and even (cartoonishly) rendered people strolling up and down the sidewalk. While zoomed up close, the city looked alive and even the individual buildings themselves had tons of character. The real beauty of Cities XXL is looking over the vast horizon and admiring the thoughtfully appointed landscapes. Everything from rolling hills, jagged peaks, long sandy beaches, and blue waters all look great. I was slightly disappointed at the lack of map customization, so you simply choose from a list of available maps. However there is certainly enough variety to keep everybody happy, as you can even build your city in the snowy arctic or sandy desert if you want. As the city grew larger, I thought that the urban areas looked a little drab and grey against the natural greenery from my god-like perch high above. Navigating around the city however is not often easy or comfortable to do. By pressing the scroll button and moving the mouse to rotate the view, the screen usually just spins out of control. It is especially hard to get around at ground level because when I want to rotate, it usually ends up zooming out. Maybe the scroll wheel on my mouse is too sensitive, but I found view navigation to be aggravating and frustrating. Also I wish there was a way to change the viewing angle instead of relying on the default angle at each zoom level. With a little patience and self-control, these navigational quirks are annoying, but stop just short of breaking the overall experience.
I found Cities XXL to be very addicting. I always wanted to play just a little more, finish just one more expansion, build one more road… until time flies by in the real world. I think this makes Cities XXL generally a good game, but it is not without its shortcomings, as I shall explain shortly. The experience was enhanced by the in-game music that is pleasant without being overbearing. I enjoyed the style of some of the funky beats with generous hints of vocals mixed in. It’s just too bad that there are only a handful of tracks in the playlist, because even though they are great to listen to the first couple of times, they repeat nauseatingly often. If you’re going to spend several hours building a city, prepare to be humming to the same songs dozens of times over. Zooming into ground level, the sounds of the streets drowns out the music and I can listen to the bustling city folk going about their days. We’ve seen all this before in other city building games, but it’s good to see that some of the basic things are done well.
The biggest mark against Cities XXL is that while it performs its basic obligatory function as a city building sim competently, it doesn’t have any one feature that makes it truly shine. Don’t get me wrong, Cities XXL is fun to play and the cities look great, but there isn’t exactly anything innovative about it. It is a fairly generic experience: you build roads, build services, zone for development, and repeat. The game engine handles some general stats and alerts you when something is deficient through the satisfaction level of your citizens. This is nothing that hasn’t been done before. Starkly contrasting to this is the latest SimCity‘s heavily promoted GlassBox engine that sought to turn city building on its head. Even though SimCity was a broken disaster when it was first released, I could see enough to understand what the developer was trying to achieve. Had the potential been realized as planned it would have been a brilliant and giant leap forward in terms of an intelligent, adaptable, and realistic city simulation engine. SimCity treats city building as a cerebral exercise, while Cities XXL gears it towards “Hey, lets build way-cool cities, LOL!” Because of this Cities XXL feels a little dated and operates on a level more like past versions of SimCity did over a decade ago. Future versions of Cities XXL will have to be more ambitious and craft a more organic engine that makes your citizens feel a little more like actual people rather than simply numbers on a page.
Overall, I found Cities XXL to be a fun city building sim that checked all the necessary boxes, but preferred to play it safe and not try something new and innovative. I liked the huge expansive maps and the faster pace, but found view navigation to be cumbersome. The learning curve is not too steep and I found it to be reasonably accessible to the newcomer. If you like SimCity you owe it to yourself to at least give it Cities XXL a try and depending on your play style you may enjoy it more than SimCity. If you’re a serious hardcore rock-star mayor, you’ve probably already doubled down in the SimCity camp. Either way the choice is yours and I’m sure most people will find something to like in Cities XXL, whether that is the beautiful landscapes, customization options, or the simplified simulation.
[taq_review]
A review code for the game was provided to us by its publishers.