CitiesXL

Sim City Societies is also a mad deviant away from the Sim City concept but for what it's worth, it's fun and beautiful and the cities I created I love looking at and seeing the individual people and neighborhoods and variety in my city because that one (unlike all others) was actually like painting on a canvas because instead of zoning, you literally had the choice of what building to put where so you could make your own choices of what buildings pop up. I purposely created a slum/inner city area that progressively changed into more affluent neighborhoods but the inner city is still where much of the vibrant life of the city is and it's pretty cool.

Tried Cities XL beta and couldn't stand it. What the other guy said about curved roads is right. They are stupidly done in this game since buildings are square tiles, if you have a curved lot, you just end up with empty green space.
 
Cyrilix said:
Added a fair amount of complexity over SC4? HAH!

Alright, let's list some bullet points for Cities XL:
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I wont get into an argument, but it seems like you are not noticing some of the base difference between SC4 and Cities XL. In Sim City you play more multiple roles keeping you in charge of many many small tasks. In Cities you play more of the mayor who will delegate certain tasks to your staff (IE you dont have to worry about that as much.)

Police stations and leisure activity is not for the whole city, it is based upon your infrastructure and road system. One Sheriffs office will not service a massive city, perhaps a small town but if you look at the information displays it will show you the highlighted road routes available and within the range of that office. Go to far away or only have small roads and their effective range drops. That is much better than SC4 with just a blanket range on anything.

All of the mods you mentioned were NOT available on release with SC4, so all of that content is not viable to use against Cities XL, it took years for the community to get all of that working with the crashes and such that still cause problems in SC4 not many people pick up the game to spend hours installing mods.

I do miss some of the planning phases from SC4 with laying water manes and pumps etc. But there is a ton that I do not miss. I do not mind not being able to go in and set a tax rate for the 12 + classes and business types in the game. I can set a tax on my residences and on my businesses, thats enough to give me control but let me direct my attention to more important things.

Retail is much more fickle, have too much of one thing and it will fail. One of my cities now my shops have been 80 - 100% satisfaction for several days now and not one has failed or flopped. Supply meets demand and it works.

There is not forced zoning so I am not sure what you mean by this. You can build what you want wherever you want. I have a city with executives next door to unqualified workers with qualified interspersed around and between. All zones are flourishing just fine.

People seem to be nocking the curved roads for some reason, while not perfect they are a huge improvement. In SC4 you could only build diagonal roads which were impossible to link with or place toll booths etc on. Building structures near those was quite problematic if you did not zone properly for 1x1 small tile buildings to move in.

The curved roads in this you can cross, build on, near or around without issues.
You can also build raised / lowered highways out of one raod, which you can pick the elevation and build over existing roads, even existing curved roads. You can build tunnels that run up hill without having to spend hours and tons of money transforming a hillside to make it just perfect so SC can put a straight tunnel through.
The building tiles each will hold different buildings, SC was build on all grid, so a small building could be 1x1 or 2x1 etc. Similar in Cities one tile can house a small house, a big house, a mansion, a high rise etc.

You have many more options with the upgrades to individual roads and some buildings. Town hall can be upgraded to better suit the type of city you are building etc.

This game is very different from SC4 in good ways and in bad ways, but people seem to be forgetting is is a brand new game from a different company not ment to be SC5.

You have true regional game play with different environments with different problems and benefits to them. You have natural resources that will bring in money if you exploit but can bring in problems of their own if you are not careful. You actually have to monitor your industry, commerce and residences much more to make sure that they are all happy and interacting properly. You can actually trade resources in real time if you play online. Which I find very good, there's competition to undersell the other guys and get your goods sold. Likewise you want to find the best deal to buy your goods.
I know in beta the system had some problems, but that word "beta" was a key point in that not being an issue. I have had no problems connecting or working with the trading system since launch. It ran a little slow once but they fixed that in 24 hours.

If your city is missing something you will actually have to import it to keep your city working. Selling extra services can become a massive source of income that will help you greatly.

I do not find the game dumbed down at all. The interface is cleaner, more intuitive making it easier to find what you need and get it built. The rewards and things which you are not close to having yet are hot shown saving space and keeping it less confusing for when your starting out. The game has not crashed one, looks great and is a ton of fun. It is not a straight Sim City port, they put a lot of nice things in there and cut out some of the things that a lot of people did not really use or like making good fun game. You can make it as easy or as hard as you want.

I dont love everything, and I do wish they had mass transit and other things put in the game at launch. However there is plenty of content there to keep new and experienced city builders happy. I hate paying online to play, but offline mode is just as fun. The trading system is not quite as competitive but still fun and there. Big massive cities can be hard to balance with all of the things you must have working to keep people happy so it is very challenging.

I wish people would actually look at the game for what it is, which for me is a really good game and not skip passed it just because some people do not like it. Which not everyone will. At least take a deep look at it and just put Sim City out of your mind when you do.
 
I've spent a hell of a lot of time in SC4. Maybe I'll check this out at some point though.
 
Nice review ripskin, thanks for that.
Might try it a bit later, just cause I'm lazy and don't feel like doing research... are they planning on adding stuff via "free" patches? (IE: Mass transit) or it's gonna be paid uppgrades?

Thanks again, great review.
 
Well... I decided to read more on this game and... oh boy.

No mass transit for single player. Whaaaat?

This feels like Hellgate: London no way I'm paying money for this.
 
Ripskin, CLEARLY they decided to target SC4 players and they even made mention to the fact that it was a spiritual successor to SC4. Nope. Lies, all lies.

Say what you want, but I found the game very finicky, boring, and the tools to provide expansion of your city inadequate, especially with respect to zoning and the square lots.

I'm sure the trading system can be "pretty neat" given some work. In fact, I think it's a nice concept, however, you don't provide nice advanced concepts without providing a lot of the fundamentals first, and that's just what this game lacks, so many city-builder fundamentals. Have a look at user reviews for this game and you'll see that a lot of people agree with me.

I really wanted to like this game. In fact, about 1.5 months ago, as I was looking at all of the videos and screenshots, and demos of how to build curved highways and highways that cross highways and etc., I had my finger right on the preorder button, but I decided to wait it out and see where everything was going given that there were a lot of concerns from the user base as to how Monte Cristo had responded to years of user feedback. Can't say I regret it.
 
So I've been thinking long and hard on whether to get this or not. I've read lots of reviews, and I found something /very/ fishy - most review sites gave it pretty decent reviews (on metacritic, gamespot is the lowest with a score of 60) yet user reviews mostly panned it. WTF is up!
 
There are few game reviewers who will truly rate their game on a 10 point scale. 7/10 is seen as "meh" but 6/10 is "avoid like the plague". How many games out there are over 9/10? How many deserve it? Reviewers are in the game to get advertisers, something they can't get if they write bad reviews.
 
What's the word on this? There's a Cities XL 2010 now, mainly bug fixes? Anyone gotten it and care to share some thoughts on whether it's worth it?
 
Thuleman said:
What's the word on this? There's a Cities XL 2010 now, mainly bug fixes? Anyone gotten it and care to share some thoughts on whether it's worth it?
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No real bug fixes... 2010 basically just added public transpo and a couple other small things. Basically, they just made the online extras available for offline play. Otherwise, it's the exact same game bugs and all (plus a few extra bugs). If you can find it at a good discount (I got it for 4 bucks), it's alright I guess. Definitely no Sim City 4 though. Not even close. Looks kinda pretty though (see page 9 of the screen shot thread for an example).
 
DDigital said:
No real bug fixes... 2010 basically just added public transpo and a couple other small things. Basically, they just made the online extras available for offline play. Otherwise, it's the exact same game bugs and all (plus a few extra bugs). If you can find it at a good discount (I got it for 4 bucks), it's alright I guess. Definitely no Sim City 4 though. Not even close. Looks kinda pretty though (see page 9 of the screen shot thread for an example).
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This.

Almost in 2011 and there's STILL no competition to Sim City 4.

:(
 
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