Design, build, and manage the world's largest and most diverse cities in Cities XXL, a sandbox RTS simulator. Bigger and better than ever before with a more powerful game engine and new interface, become the mayor of your very own sprawling metropolis. With town-planning including home locations, retail plots, offices, industry and infrastructure across 47 architectural styles and over 1000 buildings, manage the happiness of your city's denizens, with leisure activities, landmarks, and ecology and pollution management. With new structures, but also all-new ecological buildings and upgrades, such as the park-and-ride, electric car dealership, and bike hire, Cities XXL offers a greener approach!
Anyone who loves city-builders and doesn't own a previous entry in the series will likely find a solid, valuable title in Cities XXL. It's not as snappy or attractive, or even as engaging, as some of its competitors, but it's a worthwhile endeavour in its own right.
Cities XXL is a reasonably good city building game in a vacuum. It offers a decent creative experience, with flexible building options, while looking quite nice. Unfortunately, it performs extremely poorly. Then there's the elephant in the room – the other Cities games. They look the same, they perform the same, and save minor changes they ARE the same....
Cities XXL feels more like a sidegrade than a true upgrade, as it offers little more than a performance patch for its $40 price tag.
Cities XXL represents a serviceable starting point for beginners certainly, but is simply far too riddled with bugs, performance issues and recycled content to recommend to anyone else who has sampled the series previously. Much like how Cities XXL encourages the player to build their sprawling domains from the ground up, so too should the developer...
Part of the satisfaction of a city builder is looking down at your creation, watching it grow and develop. Just whizzing the camera around your constructed world in Cities XXL can be satisfying. It's just a shame it forget the other half of what makes the genre great - management. At its core it's a fun game with some solid tools and the potential for...
