The building system does have a few issues, however. For starters, plots and buildings are always square and very rigid. This limits how they can be placed considerably. My city is littered with gaps that are a hair too small for a building. This comes in part from poor road placement. There aren’t many things that one can use for references in Cities XL, so lining up roads is difficult. The road does change color to indicate particular angles in 45 degree increments, but that doesn’t always help. Also, when connecting a new
road to an old one, it will often snap to either the roads end or an already placed intersection. This leads to some rather strange angles, and may even prevent the new road from being built. I think all of this makes building harder than it needs to be. Most of the problems can easily be solved by adding a reference grid option to the game. After all, if it worked for the Forge in Halo, why wouldn’t it work for a game that’s solely about building stuff?
Cities XL 2012 City Management
While creating places where people live and work is at the forefront of making a successful city, its prosperity is dependent on many other factors. The chief among these is the overall level of satisfaction that the population has with the city and its services. Satisfaction is affected by pretty much everything, be it education, healthcare, leisure, or even traffic conditions. Usually, raising satisfaction in an area is simply a matter placing the appropriate building within range of the disgruntled citizens. However, there are some aspects that are a bit more complex. For instance, most businesses are dependent on the presence of other industries for success. Some will only be profitable if they are close to a service that complements it, such as a hotel to house potential clients. Utilities are also a big concern. While having facilities for electricity and waste management are not required, not having them available can raise the costs for people and businesses. Clearly, there is a lot to keep track of in a growing city. I think micromanagers would love the game just for this. I, however, can’t help but to get a sense of information overload.
One issue I have is that pretty much all of this happens in the foreground. For all the things that you can build in this game, there is very little that you can fiddle with behind the scenes. In the budget tab, for example, the only thing that you can adjust is the tax rate. Granted the taxes for each type of citizen and industry can be adjusted individually, but that’s about all the player can do. In SimCity 2000 you could at least customize your budget by allocating more money to different services. While this seemed possible in Cites XL, I was unable to do so. The budget would reset itself every time I tried to enter a new amount into a field. Either the budget tab doesn’t work, or the developers left out a mechanic that has been in city builders for as long as I can remember. The only method to fine tune a cities finances other than adjusting taxes is to either build something new or blow something up, and that just seems a bit one dimensional.
