Oh Monte Cristo, you have taken on a big challenge. How does one take a city building game and make it into an MMO? They have somehow found a way to make it work! The city building part of the game is fun and works well, but unfortunately the online trading aspect is somewhat flawed, laggy, and sometimes outright broken. But I will go more into each aspect further into my review.

What makes a city builder fun? Well, first off it has too look good. And boy did Monte Cristo do well in the graphics department. Each building is hand designed with care, and you can tell there was much modeling done to get things to look just right. This is where the game shines through. Cities XL has a built in screen shot feature which allows you to take some gorgious skyline shots. There is a day and night cycle feature that is very well done, and you can really see the activity of each building during the day and night cycle. The only downside is perhaps the citizens themselves. Although being a bit cartoony is okay in most games, when you have a game that looks as good as this does and your characters look worse than a PS2 game, you know you have a problem. The irony is that, the animations they do are incredible! You can follow them to and from work, watch them meet and chat with friends. I saw a group street dancing at one point. You sometimes really never know what you are going to see when you go zooming around the city.

Ok, so it looks good, how does it build you say? Well, it builds fairly well. Roads are placed pretty much anywhere you would like them. And in fact, they have a very neat curved road tool so that you can make circles, loops, or what ever you feel like making. There are some complaints on the bridges and tunnels systems as if you don't place the start and end points before you place the tunnel or bridge, it can be hard to connect the road properly. However, the developers have mentioned they are working on upgrading the roads and highways system. The highways look and work well. although people phase onto and off of them, but they will use them and you can see how much traffic visually by the cars themselves. Although placing highways can sometimes be difficult, I had no problems getting the hang of it over time. As far as the buildings, they place easy and are easy to understand what they do and what they require.

What about game mechanics? Ahh, here is where things are different from everything you might already think you know about city builders. In this game, pollution spreads, and fast! If you start a hotel,farm,office, or high tech industry and then put some heavy industry and manufacturing somewhere else on the map, at some point those other buildings are going to suffer, and big time! So what does one do when you can't make offices, but need them? This is where the MMO aspect of the game comes into play. Although you can build your own cities offline and trade with them, the true fun in the game is the online aspect. And here you can buy and import resources you might need, and sell the excess to the market. While this sounds interesting, the process is quite tedious and laggy. But I will discuss the trade more in depth further below. So, some elements of Sim Cities are NOT in fact in this game. And a die hard Sim Cities fan will easily fall into the pitfall of trying to put all the dirty stuff on the edge and not worry about it. Some people complain about the mechanics of when, where, and why people need things, and why they drive the paths they do, but I think those secrets reveal themselves each time you work on your city. Also, there are 4 different classes of worker, ranging from Unqualified to Elite. And different industries and density of buildings require different classes of workers and so forth.

So, now lets talk about the online play of the game. You can of course buy the game and play it offline as a stand alone product. This is an interesting angle as most MMO's you can not play offline at all without some serious modding, and would be futile anyways. So, in a way if you don't like the online aspect you still have a pretty interesting city builder game. The online gameplay allows you to make 5 cities on any of the planets. There are currently 2 planets for each of the 4 regions, for a total of 8 planets (if I counted correctly). You can build all 5 on one planet or one in five of the different planets. The game automatically saves every so often and uploads your city to the server. As soon as you have a need for a resource, you can import it and buy it on the market, or if you have extra goods, can put them up for sale on the market. For the most part the market does work. But it doesn't appear to work well all the time. There have been outages of several hours where no one could trade anything, or put their resources into their new Blue Prints (which in the next paragraph). And when the trade does work it gets very laggy, and its difficult to manage. Although you can list things and sell things in single or bulk, this takes much time when you have players that cancel contracts early, and the fact the contracts expire so every 5 days you are going to need to rehook your resources back up. And in fact, it seems every time I log in, I am spending hours just hooking all my cities up. Now mind you I have a vast empire of goods, but it is still time consuming. Monte Cristo has said they are reworking the system, and we will just have to see what will happen. It is interesting that you can trade in game, as well as on the website outside of the game (although this part of the game is down as they are doing something to it at the current moment.

So I mentioned something about Blue Prints. Well, they are special buildings you can get on the website either randomly or through someone giving it to you out of kindness or some sort of business arrangements. They just added about 5 monument level landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower to Cities XL. When you place a Blue Print, it is built in stages. Each stage of each Blue Print has various requirements that must be met. You fill the Blue Print with the resources and then you wait. Hours later, it moves to the next phase or stage. Finally after the 2nd or 3rd stage depending, it is built and your city can benefit from it. Monte Cristo gave all the players at least one if not more during the release weekend of the Blue Prints, and then another on the following Monday. So several are going up all over the various planets. These Blue Prints have been a game changer as far as resources go. The markets reacting to the need is interesting. Something that was selling cheap the day before is not 5 times more profitable. But again, the market is where this game has it's ups and downs. When it works, it is great. But when it goes down, you will have problems.

What about the sound? Well, the music is good, but sounds like it was mostly recycled from Monte Cristos prior product City Life. Although I enjoy it, there are only a few songs that are cycled so it could get old to some fairly fast. The other thing is that there appears to be a 30 second to minute gap of silence inbetween each track, so it is all groovey and then silence for a minute. There aren't many sound effects in the game other than placing buildings, and clicking on the buildings will trigger a sound, such as a house will be a doorbell or an office has keyboard typing noises. But other than that, the game really lacks in the sound department. If I didn't like some of the songs I would give it a lower score, but in the sound department I have to say a 6. There needs to be more tracks, no silence, and players have complained that there needs to be ambient noises from parts of the city. I am sure Monte Cristo will take note of this and make tweaks to this part of the game as well.

And finally we close with content. The promo videos show trains and buses and a few other things that have yet to make it into the game. This is a bit misleading to show a feature that has not been put into play yet in attempts to draw players into the game. It does feel a bit like the game was rushed to market a bit early. I can't help but feel like the game was released when it was to compete with the sales of Tropico 3. Not that either of them are similar, one is a city building MMO and the other a dictator simulator city builder, but it did seem strange to me. However, all MMO's have problems on launch, and its only been a few weeks, so we will see what the Monte Cristo team has to offer and see if they can step up to the plate. It looks as some new content is coming out perhaps even later today, some new euro house designs and other things. They are putting patches out every few days, but the weekends are bare. Also, the lack of official forums for the game have forced many sites like this to exist to help house the needs of the players. And again, no one knows what goes on in Monte Cristo's secret board room meetings, so we will just have to wait and see.

So, all in all, is this a good game? Sure, why not. I have wasted money on worse games. If you like city building games, you will likely like this one. But there is a bit of a learning curve as they didnt' try to totally follow the path of Sim City. As a stand alone product it is not bad. As an MMO, it needs a bit of work. What does work, when it works is great, and I don't want to make it sound like trade is always down as it is not. It is mostly up... mostly, heh. But this is the kind of game you either really like and become addicted to or just don't get it or get frustrated and give up early. I have talked with the Monte Cristo team in the in game chat, and it seems as they are aware of what needs to be done and that they do listen to some of the concerns of the players. However, the lack of official forums is worrysome. There is even talk about how there use to be forums during beta, but some of the things said were deemed unfit for Cities XL's image, and so the forums were removed. I do not know as I was not in beta, but I can imagine something like that being possible. But regardless, here we are, and here is a forum, so feel free to use it to post questions or comments and Cities XL. I guess I need to finish up with a rating scale of sorts so here we go:

Graphics : 7 (Buildings look great but civies could use some love)
Sound : 6 ( Not enough songs / silence between tracks / low use of SFX)
Gameplay : 7 (it is balanced well, but could be fleshed out more but likely will be)
Addictiveness : 7 (just going to place one more house)

So I guess I give it a 7. That is a fairly high score in my opinion. There are only a few games that I could think that would earn a 10 in my book, and I might be generous with a 7 here. However it is better than an average game but could stand some work. But since it is new, and is being worked on, and i have seen the updates happen, I will cut it some slack. So 7 is a good score if you like city building games. If you do not like city build games i wouldn't suggest it, however you might still enjoy it. I keep seeing alot of W.O.W. players on there, which is perplexing and disturbing at the same time, hehe. But it seems that all types are coming to check it out. And one good thing is, if you just do not like the online, you can always play the offline for free! And actually , as far as MMO's go, it is only like $6 times 3 months to play at the cheaper rate, which is NOT bad when most games want $13 to $15 a month to play anymore. So, I will stick with it for now, and see if Monte Cristo is going to keep on adding the goodies. Each time something new comes out, it is great, so I can't wait to see what they do next. Thanks for reading my review, and see you in game!