The only other thing that the player can control is trading with other cities. There is one little problem with this, however. There aren’t any other cities to trade with. This means that the player must build another city to produce the recourses that the first lacked. For me, this kind of ruins my experience. I am anxious to unlock bigger buildings, and now I have to start over from scratch. It’s either that or I have to allocate funds to an industry that I don’t want. You can still trade with an entity called “Omnicorp”, which I’m pretty sure is a subsidiary of “Lexcorp”. Unfortunately, dealing with Omnicorp is so expensive that it isn’t even worth doing. I had a sizable city going with a booming economy and I still didn’t have enough money to trade with them. I guess having this system does make sense in a way. Naturally, no city can specialize in everything. This can also encourage players to try out more diverse maps in order to gain access to more resources. But with how difficult it is to keep one city running, I don’t see the fun in juggling several at once.
Cities XL 2012 Graphics
The graphics quality in Cities XL is somewhat disappointing. It looks pretty at first glance, but the game suffers from more than a few lag issues. Zooming into ground level is always a problem. While there is a lot of detail to see at street level, the textures take a long time to load. In addition, the achievement animations, which always trigger late, always slow the game to a crawl. In fact, they look so laggie that I half expect my computer to pass a kidney stone. This comes as a surprise to me since my PC is well above the game’s requirements. Also, the models in the game aren’t all that spectacular to begin with. Considering where technology is at today, I would have expected better from Cities XL.
Conclusion
Cities XL 2012 seems to have renewed my addiction to building stuff. Despite my qualms about it, I still can’t keep from getting lost among my construction projects. The game can get really irritating with the sheer number of things to manage, but fans of the genre may welcome that. The only major problem is the inflexibility of building placement. While there are a lot of options available, there is just no getting around the rigid plots and oddly angled roads. Ultimately, I can’t recommend Cities XL at full price, but it might be worth picking up on sale.
