Trade also becomes more important as your city grows, as you must import the resources you aren’t producing, and export your surpluses. YES! This part of the experience is the most fun.īuilding up the rest of the city is straightforward, as citizens begin demanding services at various population levels, and you add the necessary features. Roads benefit most from this flexibility, with the ability to build freeform curved roads. This allows for much more unique city design than seen in other games, and enhanced creative freedom. Zones can also be built plot by plot for those with an absurd level of patience. Square zones can be customized – how big should the roads be? What grid size should the blocks be? – while a free zone option allows building of areas that are of atypical shape, while the game inserts plots and roads at generally logical points. Building zones is my favourite part of XXL. The game provides hints about what your next action ought to be, and you can keep track of city happenings, but the interface is fair from friendly, with such data buried a few layers deep. One only needs to look at the Steam user reviews or a comparison video to see that people are NOT happy with this release.īut how does it play? There are 60 or so prebuilt maps to choose from, but there are no options to manually landscape at all – which limits what can be done in the pre-produced spaces. Of course, plenty of games iterate on themselves, but I’ve rarely seen such a feeble attempt to justify a new product. The UI has changed colour, there a few new environments, and steam workshop support – things you’d generally expect in a patch or as DLC, not a new, full price product. Building cities is obviously at the core of the matter, but XXL is not a similar game to XL – it’s the same game with a little bit of freshening. “What else are you going to do in a city builder besides build cities?” Fair point. For all intents and purposes, Cities XXL is the same game as XL. Since then, Cities XL 2011, XL 2012, and XL Platinum have hit the scene, each iterating insignificantly on the previous. Cities XXL is the newest entry into the genre – or is it? Cities XL was released in 2009 to middling reviews and poor sales. A seaside resort, a towering metropolis, an industrial powerhouse, a flexible simulation allows for creation of all these, and countless more.

City builders are the gaming world’s blank canvas – here’s some land, build your dream. Figuratively or literally, a blank canvas is the source of all creation.

Cities xl platinum review