City Life. Tycoon City: New York. Micropolis. Pretenders to the throne have come and gone over the years, but we all know there’s only one name in city-building games that really holds any weight: SimCity. Every other game either tries to be it or tries to reinvent it. Cities XL is no different, offering up an experience that could easily be misconstrued as SimCity 5 – but for fledgling desktop city planners, is that really a bad thing?

The mechanics in Cities XL are going to be strikingly familiar to any SimCity veteran. Build roads, designate commercial, industrial and residential zones. Attend to the needs of your citizens by building police stations and schools. In fact – the game feels like a cookie-cutter version of every SimCity we’ve seen in the past.

But there are some tweaks here that I’m not used to seeing in Cities XL’s aforementioned mentor. Different businesses need different kinds of workers, which means you’ll need to build residences that will attract the types of workers needed. You’ll also be able to determine what types of businesses you’ll be zoning for. Maybe you’d rather see manufacturing facilities. Maybe office workers. Maybe you’d like to just get away from it all and choose a city teaming with farm life. There’s a level of depth and customization here that surpasses anything we’ve seen before, and it only gets larger in scope as your city grows.

Speaking of larger, I really need to address the elephant in the room here. What sets Cities XL apart from anything that’s ever come before it, is the multiplayer experience. Cities XL offers a persistent world where thousands of other player created cities exist. You’ll be able to engage these other players in trade. If you have a surplus of oil in your city, you can export it to someone who needs it. In turn you can buy the electricity that you’re so sorely lacking from a neighboring city.

There’s a catch though – if you want to play online, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription fee. It’s a sticking point – asking us to pay for something as frivolous as trading feels somewhat ridiculous, but trading becomes an integral part of the game. Sure Cities XL offers a single player mode, but if you’re going to tackle that you may as well just stick with Sim City 4. The appeal of Cities XL is in the added layer of multiplayer interaction. But then this isn’t even remotely deep enough to justify the added expense. The whole multiplayer component feels surprisingly tacked on and shallow.

The gameplay itself, while offering a good deal of depth in terms of customization and zoning selection, feels streamlined to the point of simplicity. Part of what made SimCity so appealing is the feeling that there’s always something more you could be learning. SimCity 3000 came with a manual that was thicker than my thumb – no such instruction is needed in Cities XL. After a quick tutorial the game is damned-near idiot proof.

While the game tries to embody the SimCity spirit, it just feels like something’s missing. There’s a level of personality that’s just not there. The more I played, the less I felt like I was building a living, breathing city, instead feeling like I was just trying to balance the numbers. More factories? Guess I’ll have to make more unqualified workers. Bored citizens? I guess I’ll build a Ferris Wheel.

Meeting the needs of my city felt less like being a real mayor and more like putting the right punch card in the right hole. It’s hard to nail down exactly why this is. Then again, if it was easy to figure out, anyone could make a successful SimCity clone.

Cities XL is a good city-building game – there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the best I’ve seen since SimCity 4 back in 2003. Cities XL offers some tweaks to the formula that I like, but at the end of the day so much of what’s different here still feels shallow enough that it doesn’t really feel like it’s doing anything terribly differently. If you’re a fan of city-building and you can get past the online fee, Cities XL is a village that might just be worth erecting. Just don’t expect it to re-invent the wheel.

Contest Alert
We have retail 5 copies of the game to giveaway. Leave your comment with “Living in the City” somewhere within it and Wednesday December 2 @ 9pm EST we’ll randomly pick 5 winners. Don’t forget to leave your comment with a valid email, so we have a way of contacting you.