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We have some difficulties in reviewing the latest Focus Home Interactive city management software. Before giving you other explanations, go and re-read the review of Cities XL 2012 by Rosario Salatiello. If you look at the cons it says "Lack of novelty".

Now let's jump to the Cites XL 2011 review. What can you read about the cons? "After the collapse of the online component for the 2009 edition, this new chapter is a sort of big patch". We rebuild for the slowest: the 2012 edition was not very original compared to the 2011 edition which in turn looked like a big patch of the 2009 one. If you want we can add that in 2013 Cities XL Platinum was released, a sort of definitive version of Cities XL 2012 with all the additional content published over the months, in addition to the various bugfixes and gameplay adjustments. By now you should have figured it out for yourself, but it's better to make it clear: the biggest difficulty we found in reviewing Cities XXL is that the more we played it, the more we were amazed at how similar it was ... no, not similar, identical to the previous edition, to the point that we could take one of the reviews above and use almost all of the concepts without hesitation. If we wanted to, we could kill Salatiello, delete the article and then propose it again with the extra X in the title and there would be no consistency problems. We have often talked about titles similar to their predecessors, but in the vast majority of cases it is a saying to indicate that there is little originality in the gameplay or in the plot or in other aspects. In this case, unfortunately, the sentence must be interpreted in a ruthlessly literal way.

We reviewed Cities XXL, but we had actually reviewed it back in the days of Cities XL Platinum

The news...

To list the new features in Cities XXL it takes very little: we have support for multicore, a few more buildings among the advanced ones and a general overhaul of the interface, which is even difficult to realize and which, frankly, does not improve then who knows how much that of Cities XL Platinum.

Let's say that the impression is that some buttons have been moved and some, irrelevant options have been added, just to be able to claim to have made some changes. The basic functions have remained identical to those of the past. For the rest we have the same game dynamics, the same progression, the same buildings, the same buildings, the same vehicles and pedestrians and so on. In short, you take a virgin territory, you place building land on it and you watch the urban fabric grow, intervening where the requests become more pressing. Lack of work for the workers? Factories or shops are built. Do you need executives for tech companies? Building areas dedicated to the upper middle class are built. Do we have a nice lake to exploit? Then we build hotels for tourists and so on. When our city has reached a considerable size and is well characterized from an economic point of view, we can start profitable exchanges with other cities in order to compensate for what we lack and, perhaps, gain something from the surplus. The trouble is that we did the exact same things in Cities XL Platinum, with the same results, because graphically it wasn't even half a step forward and the recycling of three-dimensional models is total. The same goes for multiplayer, where innovations can be counted on the fingers of one hand of a maimed. It is worth considering Cities XXL only if you have never tried a title in the series, otherwise it is better to wait for the upcoming Cities Skylines of Colossal Order, which at least promises some news from a visual and gameplay point of view.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Intel Core i7 -4770 processor
16 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card
Windows 8.1 operating system

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Vista, 7, 8
Processore: Amd/Intel Dual-Core 2.5 GHZ
Video Card: With 768 MB of VRAM 100% compatible with DirectX10 and Shaders 4.0. From Radeon HD 5670 / Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or higher
RAM: MB 3072
Disk space: 8 GB

Comment

Digital Delivery Steam Price 39,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

4.0

Readers (22)

4.3

Your vote

Cities XXL is Cities XL Platinum with some interface improvements, which itself was the full version of the 2012 edition of Cities XL, which itself was an update of the 2011 edition, and so on until the 2009 edition , the first. It is not possible to ignore it and turn your head the other way, because it is too blatant operation. In Cities XXL, there is no new feature that is worth the full ticket price. If we called it an updated version of Cities XL Platinum we would still be far from the truth, because we have seen free DLCs that are much more substantial than the innovations introduced by Focus Home Interactive in this pack. Probably some of the code has been rewritten to improve multicore support, without improving the graphics rendering by an ounce, but is that enough? Some advanced buildings have also been added, but the question remains the same: did they require a new chapter? Come on, let's not joke. Honestly, we wouldn't even know why you should buy this instead of Cities XL Platinum, which costs half the price and only has a handful of content less.