Size isn’t everything. Still, for a building-based game, CitiesXL boasts a fairly titanic beta client. A 2.5GB .rar file rapidly mushrooms into an install of well over 6GB, and that’s without us counting the updates – which even at this early stage can reach Conan-like proportions of a hundred or so megabytes apiece.
CitiesXL is marketed by developer Monte Cristo as the biggest thing to hit the strategy MMO sphere to date, hence the name and the amount of your hard drive space that it consumes. And if you’re a hardcore city-building fan there’s certainly plenty to get excited about in its polished complexity – which is perhaps why Namco Bandai was so keen to pick up distribution on this occasion.
Building sims are still fairly thin on the ground in the MMO space, and those that do exist tend to stick firmly to the fantasy-based worlds that make up most of the MMO market share we see today. Witness the free-to-play Evony, formerly known as Civony; you know, the one with the notorious skimpy-clad YouTube adverts that reflect little on the game’s content (we say ‘little’ rather than ‘not at all’ because Evony’s inescapable in-game chat channel is populated by 13-year-old boys asking plaintively in badly spelled caps: “Where do I get to see the boobies?”).
CitiesXL is nothing like Evony and its ilk. It’s a full-blown real-world management sim in the style of the iconic SimCity franchise. You start out in CitiesXL by creating your avatar, a fully animated 3D toon that can be customised with a fairly full set of face, body and clothing options. We won’t mention The Sims because you know where we’re going. They’re not entirely true to life – log in as a female character and the whole XL thing kicks in again, and by default your avatar’s breasts will be set to a ridiculous 99 per cent. (Evony players, this is where you get to see the boobies). But why do you need an avatar in the first place? Interestingly, you can visit other players’ in-game cities and stroll around at street level.
After creating your avatar it’s time to dive into the game properly, and for dedicated sim fans this is where it starts to get interesting. There are a lot of different viewing options available in CitiesXL, and the first you’re presented with is a pleasant Google Earth-style globe. You’ll need to scour the surface of the planet to find yourself an available slot to start building your city, represented by a white dot. Green and red dots represent pre-existing cities owned by other players, and whether they’re online right now or not.
Navigating the globe can be a bit tricky, as it’s done by squeezing your scroll wheel. On the average desktop mouse this is probably as easy and intuitive as right-clicking, but on our steroid-fuelled Razer Lachesis it was a painfully twitchy experience. Other views available include a standard top-down isometric pseudo-3D and a fully 3D Street View type interface, both of which can be navigated using the arrow keys. Street View is pretty polished – it’s not up to the standards of the latest 3D games but it’s more than tolerable, and sleekly similar to City Of Heroes. Mousing over vacant lots provides some basic information about the nearby environment – terrain, climate, raw resources, and so on.
We chose a temperate lakeside location in a verdant greenbelt and set up our first structure – the all-important City Hall. You play as the mayor of your fledgling town, so this is essentially your power base. After that you need to set up a power station and some housing, and this is where the depth of CitiesXL really starts to show itself. The first structures the game’s tutorial advises you to build are low-density housing for unqualified workers, so set up your first sink estate and wait for unemployment and social disenfranchisement to rocket. Tabs around the interface allow you to monitor population, employment rates, social satisfaction and much more. Just like Gordon Brown’s government, you’ll soon need to find somewhere for your doley scum to work to keep them out of trouble, so slap up some heavy industry lots in an out-of-town location and build a road between the two.
We’re reliably informed that CitiesXL is the first ever building sim to allow you to create curved roads, so sit back and let that momentous information sink in for a second. Once this is out of the way it’s time to turn your mind to gentrification. Chuck up a couple of nice suburbs for qualified workers and some farmland nearby – you’ll need to keep these away from heavy industry or your food yields will be blighted by pollution and your more upmarket citizens will start whining. They’ll need a nice air-conditioned office block or three to work in, along with retail and leisure facilities to help them fritter away their miserable lives.
All of these things cost money, of course, and while you can levy taxes, high ones will soon result in social unrest. Businesses aren’t always a reliable proposition for cash generation either, unless they have the necessary infrastructure to keep them going – think storage facilities, oil wells, farming, decent roads, transport links and even hotels. One thing that CitiesXL will offer, however, is the Tycoon-style GEMs (or Game Enhancement Modules) in which you can set up a particular business and effectively micro-manage it. Trading with other players can provide some much needed injections to your workforce, food, industry and other resources. If you’re not the kind of person who gets excited about city-building sims then this is all about as interesting as the finer points of urban planning in Birmingham circa 1962. If you are, however, then CitiesXL offers an impressive range of depth and scope, and its online functionality seems considered and well planned rather than a tacked-on novelty.