So I finally got my copy of the Cities XL game (Thanks Royal Mail for being so damm slow…) and as much as I’d love to say otherwise so far it’s a bit of a disappointment. The game feels half baked, specially on the online version.

As city builders go, the interface is easy and intuitive and it’s quite easy to get the hang of it. It’s not complex and it guides you all the way, telling you what to do at each stage. Build this! Build that! If you follow the instructions you can get heaps of money in just a few turns. The graphics are generally pretty, when building a city and seeing it grown.

The avatar creation process is an entirely different thing though. Millions of options and sliders, but there’s no way of creating a female avatar that doesn’t look like a guy on a skirt, a famished 3rd word child or a combination of the two. If you manage, please link me a screenshot and tell me how did you do it. Hair colours cannot be changed and some of the hair styles are frankly startling. Considering that your avatar is going to be your face on the Internet if you use the online playing mode, they could have at least made a bit more of an effort on this. Didn’t help that it crashed several times and was slow and laggy, probably due to being connected to the main servers.

Once resigned to having an ugly avatar, the game directly pushes you into the tutorial (though you can skip it if you want). I personally jumped directly into creating my city, and apart from being very easy I have nothing to complain about. The interface is intuitive and it tells you how everything is going by using colours (worry if an icon is red, cheer if it’s green, take a look if it’s yellow). I must say the interface is a bit of a drama queen, and will start screaming for you to do something about, for example, unemployment, when you have less than 1% of your citizens without a job. Graphics are good, interface responds and if you find dull to have to unlock your buildings one by one you can turn that feature off. Though it helps avoiding over development and going over your budget.

The online mode (6.50EUR a month) is repeatedly pushed down your throat, and makes you feel the game has no meaning without it. They even give you a week free, that starts the moment you register your game on their website (a pre-requisite for playing). Well, it’s what makes Cities XL different after all but… It’s not finished. The Marketplace (where you can start trades with other players) is laggy and you need to do the trades through the website instead of in game if you want them to work. Said website is also buggy, and feels slow and unresponsive. The chat is ok, people were nice and I must say quite polite for what I was expecting. But the game just feels like single mode with a very very bad trading interface. Basically, you’re paying 6.50EUR a month just to avoid being ripped by the game AI on the resource trades. Or for a chance at that, since players aren’t much better, as everybody seems to be trying to buy and sell the same. I doubt I will be paying for that any time soon.

The main problem I see with the game is that it just requires an online connection, and the single player mode feels like just an extra. I want to be able to play it without Internet, on my laptop, when I am bored and have nothing else to do because there’s no Internet. I didn’t buy the game to be told repeatedly to subscribe to a sub-par online game that is slow, feels slow and doesn’t really add anything to the game at this point. Hopefully it will get better with patches and the new content add-ons (GEM) that they are releasing, but I won’t hold my breath. Maybe the hype was too much and that’s why I am disappointed. It’s not a bad game, it’s a good city builder, but it’s not as good as I expected. And please, sort out the lag on the online Interface.