Buy Cities XL Platinum

i increased my score a couple point to try to offset the trolls and griefers that wrongfully malign this otherwise great game. and while its not worth a 10 its definitively not a 0!. i would say about a 7 and with all the stuff on xlnation.net perhaps an 8!

please understand that this game has a bit of history. over 4 years ago a small company named monte cristo developed and released it as massively multiuser online game. unfortunately less than a year after they went broke due to low subscription rate and were unable to finish the game. soon after focus acquired the writes and reworked it as a single player offline game and released it. since then making minor fixes and about once a year they have been releasing new content dlcs.

as you can imagine the people who originally purchased and subscribed to cities xl unlimited edition, the mmo version from the now bankrupt developer, are ♥♥♥♥ed off that they got stuck with a dead game after only being able to play with it for such a short time.

so they troll steam forums and even this site complaining about the long defunct developers and about long ago fixed bugs and basically spooking people away from buying the game.

many do not even own or play this game, they just own the other game and since the servers have all been shutdown for that game long ago can't no longer play it. yet they refuse to upgrade to this game, basically wanting the new developers to basically give them the new game.

here check out the facts for yourself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_XL

i own and play just about every city sims/builders that is out there

this is great game, loads of fun, runs great, have played it for hundreds of hours.

even better if you go to xlnation.net you will find hundreds of mods for it, everything imaginable and a very active community over 40,000 members!

i also want to say that there is no serious memory leak or programming issue like some people are posting. what issue that people are having is that the game allows you to build huge i mean huge cities, ive seen some with population over 90M and basically they do not set limits other than the hardware you have. so as you add more and more buildings and roads and the cities get larger and more complex sure its going to use more and more memory until you run out of memory and until your cpu/gpu cant handle the size of the cities and complexity and the framerate goes down. It's hard to put in words just how large and complex your cities can get, they can look so real that you can't distinguish screenshots from real world images of some of the worlds largest cities. in fact i cant think of a real world single city that has a population of over 90M. so what you have a people with low end hardware trying to build cities they can't support. and since its a 32-bit application, like most games, the cities can only get so large and complex before you hit the 2-3gb limit that windows imposes. the trick is to balance city size and complexity and not try to build cities that don't make sense and would not be practical even in real life.

so yes the game is a 32-bit game with the game logic running in a single thread, but most other games out there have the same limitations. the only difference between those games and this game is that this game does not impose limits on you like simcity or tropico or anno does. also this games lets u pack the density of the cities to real world levels and beyond. in this way its more a city builder than a sim i would say.

having said that the game, like all other games and software, does have bugs and issues, but luckily they are for minor and can easily be ignore of worked around.

Awesome game if you are in to city builders, but you will need a good rig to run it. It starts off without lag but the larger your city gets the more it lags up until it's not playable anymore.

I bought this game in desperation despite all the negative things I heard about it.

The game is not bad. It has tons of nice features, different buildings, good details, a decent engine. BUT, it lacks one very major feature: management. You don't need to manage your financials in this game as time isn't a constraint. Once you make a few houses and industries your flowchart turns green and you can skip forward to get tons of money. You don't lose anything by doing that. Just like the first Sim City from 1990.

Unlocking some buildings over time and making some old ones obsolete when time goes by would easily solve the issue. There can easily be diminishing tax returns from old houses or you might have to renew buildings over time. Unfortunately in its current state the game is not challenging at all.

I don't want to give a negative review because of only one issue and there are no other city sims playable but they definitely have to solve this problem.

I'd love to give this a thumbs up, here is why I won't:

The game is great! Its fun, realistic, and you can create economies. Its definitely the best city simulator I have played.
But. And this is a big butt (*s♥♥♥♥er*)

Its so bugged and glitched out that after a little while it becomes impossible to play. Too many aspects of the game have bugs that are game breaking. For instance (and this is the most frusturating) after a while, trading with the AI company is beyond worthless, its actually harmful to trade with them because the glitch makes it that you have to pay to get rid of your goods, as if they were plague infested. I don't mean pay as in like a tarriff, I mean as in you pay as much to sell your good as they should to buy it. If you can't trade you can't expand, and if you can't expand the game is done.

Fun, but broken. Please fix. Until then, don't buy this game.

I will recommend this game, but be cautious. This game gets insanely difficult, and fast. Once you get access to basic utilities, like water, power, and oil, it can be so easy to bankrupt your city by trying to offer all of these to your city at once. This game runs on supply and demand. If you're producting a lot of oil, and your city can't pay for it (not that your city won't demand it; they just won't be able to pay for it), your city will lose money by extracting more oil than what it can pay for. This goes with about a dozen different resources the game takes into account. You can also have not enough resources. This makes things rather complicated, because you will always run into a scenario in which your city needs more resources than it can pay for, even if you trade with other cities.

Your city will always be plagued with problems once you get to a significant population. Traffic is always a problem. Always. There is no way to really mend the traffic problem. The tourism also really doesn't make much sense to me.

However, I recommend this game because it's kind of realistic. You can't make everyone happy. You can't "pre-plan" your city by making interstates in a town with 200 population. You have to build your city up and then create those, causing you to have to re-route traffic and demolish structures so you can work on your interstate system, which is a headache I bet most leaders in transportatioon have. You will have to have a ghetto and also a rich population. Your citizens will get bored. The game is also beautiful and zooming into ground level gives a lot of awesome views.

I have been a fan of build and manage games ever since Populous came out on the Amiga, after that came Sim City (they were both relased 1989) and then kinda got tired of them or should I say, i grew up, Sim City got more bells and whistles, Monster invasion and crap never appealed to me.

Cities XL Plat is a hardcore city building game, it's realistic to the point nothing in a city can ever be stagnant or it fades away, the better the city the faster the problems, trying to fix to many issues, gets you new ones.

As many of these games its about keeping a balance and anticipating where once you grow your new problems will arise.

I read some negative reviews cant say I agree with any of them, as a city building game its really fun and probably has 50-100 hours of gameplay before you feels it has nothing more to give you, Sim City has more bells and whistles, but this game has hardcore realism, it reminds me of Banished.

Stability i am not sure about, no problems at all so far, intel/nvidia, nothing special.

I've read reviews and in the game Community Hub stating "Lags/Memory Leaks"
I'm like "yeah, not with my rig!

*facepalms*
I've got a very nice rig that handles NBA2k15, and other high end games. 16GB DDR3 RAM 1600Mhz and a 6 Core AMD processor XFX AMD Radeon HD 7770 graphics.....

When i hit the main menu, the game was lagging....barely responsive....then it was fine. I started the tutorial, at first, things were fine...then it started freezing, stuttering. I alt tabbed and checked task manager. Sure enough, ONE CORE of he processor was MAXED OUT and the ram was quickly filling up. ALL USED by this game...I tried to set the Affinity of the game, no luck. It was using ONE CORE of my 6 Core Processor.
I can't play it waste of money and one hell of a memory hog.

STAY AWAY!

TLDR: A great city building game that could've been the best for years to come. There are too many issues though.
I still rate it 3rd for me after Simcity 3000 and 2000.

Beware of the compatability issues, performance issues, bugs and illogical things (the save menu WTF).

The city building is solid and all the info you need is available. Sometimes the city's management information is a bit hard to find, but it's there. You don't have to lay down power lines or water pipes, which I didn't like at first, but got used to. The roads can be curved in any way you want which is really cool.

The game is easy at first and the tutorials are good (not voiced though), but there is a big difficulty jump when your basic utility facilities aren't enough for your city anymore. The city will start to demand more electricity, fuel, water and waste disposal very suddenly. Also when you start building high density stuff the demands go up quite a lot.

The game also seems laid back and fun instead of taking itself super seriously. Just like Simcity 3000 did (And Simcity 4 didn't). It doesn't mean it makes the game any worse as a simulator, but more fun to play.

Graphics look really nice and are freely rotatable and zoomable 3D. You can tilt the view upwards/downwards with only 2 presets though.
I can't really get why some people complain about the graphics.
You can zoom in to see the details, which I didn't really care at first, but I found it's really cool to see your cities from the street level in the "postcard" camera mode.

Sounds are what you'd expect in a city builder and music suits the game nicely. The intro song does play a bit too much though.

I have not run in to any compatability issues with Win 7 64bit, but there are many people reporting them on the forums.

And the to the negatives:
The game runs fine when building a small city, but when the city size reaches 500k people or so it brings any computer down to below 10FPS in some situations (like making bus lines or zooming way out).
It runs only in single threaded mode, but also must be optimized poorly. Some tweaks to the game files help, but not enough to make building big cities fun.

There are some bugs like sometimes the trading does give or take more money than it should, some special building names or descriptions not showing up properly and one or two sounds not playing properly (police station is one).

And then there are these logical issues. When you click a diskette image in the menu that is labeled "Save" and in the following interface click a save thumbnail, it LOADS the save instead of saving (there is a confirmation dialog, but it's too easy to just click ok). Also it overwrites the autosave instantly at that moment.
There are more of these issues, but they're just annoyances, not wasting hours of city building!

Hey, it lets you play single player without an internet connection or server log-in. 10/10

But seriously, I wish I had found this game before I sunk tons of hours into Sim City: DRM Edition. Cities XL is robust, beautiful, has crazy amounts of freedom, and city plots that are absurdly gigantic. Anyone who is a fan of city building sims owes it to themselves to buy this game. I hope some day down the line I recover from my SimCity burnout and can come back and really dive into this awesome game.

After the big disappointments the last 2 Sim Cities were this game is just what you need to scratch that city planning/building inch. Once you get the hang of it, and understand how the supply/demand and resources work in this game you are set to do pretty much anything you want. The mode where you can handpick any buildings is the best part IMHO, something I always wished vanilla Sim City 4 had.

While this game is certainly good, it is rather broken. Watch out when you save, the "save" menu actually seems to revert your save. Just exit the game when you are done playing.

GREAT CITY BUILDING AND MANAGEMENT GAME

A summary is located at the end of this review, if you don't want to read everything.

GAMEPLAY, CONTENT & UI

- The game features rather powerful design tools for placing roads and buildings, but they can be picky to work with, so it will take some time to get used to. This applies to all designing and building tools!

- There are customization options for roads, bridges and housing. For roads and bridges, you get the option to convert them to one way roads. For each type of housing (industrial, residential, offices, shops and so forth), you can choose different levels of density (from small houses to skyscrapers). You are in control of what type of buildings you want, so you can have skyscrapers in the center of your city and small houses in suburban areas.

- You have the option of doing regular square housing areas, do "free-zoning" and place the houses (almost) the way you desire, do a straight line with houses on each side of a small road or place single units.

- You must manage an economy and various demands for the city.

Economy: you need to keep your city from going bankrupt. You can export things you have enough of to either Omnicorp (AI controlled) or other cities that you've built and you can use taxes, build more factories, offices etc. to raise the city's income.

Supply & demand: You have a list of various things that the city needs and you simply have to produce more or import the item in question if the demand is higher than the supply.

- Basic things that are needed, like in other city building games, are industries, shops, water, electricty and various city services such as police and education. In Cities XL Platinum, you also have to either produce or import food, there is a demand for offices, manufacturing factories, high tech industry, hotels and so on. In other words, you have a lot to manage in Cities XL Platinum.

- The trade system is a bit buggy since you can "steal" money from Omnicorp, which pretty much neglects the economy management aspect of the game for a while. When your city grows, you won't be able to rely on stealing money from Omnicorp. Your city will require more money and resources to function so the economy asapect of the game "makes a return" later on.

- You can unlock all buildings right off the bat by changing settings in the game menu.

- You get 60 gigantic maps. They are so big that you can create different districs in your city so you can place your filthy factories in a secluded area and your pretty financial and housing areas in a pollution free zones.

- Each map has special properties, so one map might be better suited for food production while other maps are better for tourism.

- Over 1000 different buildings are included. This adds a great amount of variety to your cities and all of this is comes with the base game.

- There are no tooltips on how to use the zoning tools, how to build roads, how to manage x, how to do y. The game has tutorial missions/cities but everyone doesn't like playing tutorial missions. Some people like to jump into the game and learn how to play with the help of tooltips. I also had to google several things, such as keyboard shortcuts.



VISUALS & GAME ENGINE

Since this is a city building game, visuals aren't top priority since you'll be spending most of your time zoomed out and expanding your city.

But anyways...

- The game has good visuals overall but they aren't anything special.

- The textures are decent and look good from distance but if you zoom in all the way, you'll notice that they aren't of high resolution.

- Lightning is also pretty decent and has some basic shadows.

- The game engine is badly optimized as it will start lagging once your city becomes larger. With a population of around 220 000 people, the game lags a little on my GTX 780Ti, 12GB of RAM and i7.



FINAL VERDICT

GAMEPLAY, CONTENT & UI - SCORE: 7,6

VISUALS & GAME ENGINE - SCORE: 5,2

+ Powerful design tools.
+ Loads of different building models, bridges, etc.
+ Customization options for roads and housing areas.
+ Mods.
+ Slightly more in-depth supply & demand management than Sim City.

+/- One bug allows your city to get large amounts of money by "stealing" from Omnicorp.
+/- Tutorial missions are available so you can learn how to play the game.
+/- You may unlock all buildings from the start by changing settings in the game menu.

- The game has quite a bit of bugs.
- Very poor optimization; can even lag on high end computers.
- No tooltips, so learning how to play can take a bit of time.

WORTH BUYING AT FULL PRICE? If you're really into city builders/management games and have a powerful computer, yes. If not, then no.

It's what the New SimCity should have been

Is good looking, can be played offline, has huge maps and alot more challange.

Memory leakage causes large cities, like you seen in the screenshots, to be virtually unplayable. So either make small cities and stare at the bad animations on the roads, or play a medium sized city at 10 fps.

relaxing game with good music

Its a great game, however with the huge memory leaks, the longer you play (or load a long playted map) the worse the lag gets, eventually it will just chain crash.

Started using 2 gigs, ended when it maxed out my 16 =\

This game is excellent, and in most ways vastly exceeds the new Sim City.

"Like Simcity without DRM issues." -IGN

This game is excellent (I can't believe I picked it up during a steam sale!). It's like Sim City, but instead of placing individual buildings, you zone plots of land for different things. I would definitely reccomend this to anyone who wants a good economics game about balancing a budget and satisfying customers. I love it.

Good sub for simcity lovers. I think I bought it at $20, it was worth it for spending a few hours here and there.