I’m going to start calling my brief run down posts “A Brief…” from now on, seems simpler that way. For the first I have Cities XL, and what a short post it will be! (sorry, busy right now…)

To start off in Cities XL you create your avatar — no need to go through this, it’s pretty self explanatory and typical. You have various sliders and outfits and such — mess around till you find what you like. The avatar is more a social piece than anything, so don’t worry too much over it.

After creating your avatar, locate an empty city on the planet of your choice and claim it. You’ll start out with a nice, clean, blank slate to build your city. Before long it’ll look something like:

City View

That’s still a small city, mind you. I focused more on agriculture at the start, while taking small leaps in population and business to insure I kept an unemployment/avalible job rating of 0% and that all citizens were well off.

The game plays similarly to most city builders; you place buildings/roads/whatever like so:

Placing Buildings...

Remember that you can’t go into the red while placing buildings — you have to have the cash on hand to build anything. There’s many buildings that will cost you money after building — hospitals and schools come to mind — so watch your income before placing anything like that down, or you’ll find yourself on a slippery road to debt that will cost you and your citizens.

You collect taxes from citizens and businesses, raising said taxes will increase your income, as will bringing in more businesses and citizens. If you need more income, however, there is another option. Trade. Trading is one of the primary social aspects (if not the primary and only one) of the game. Currently there’s an NPC corporation that can be traded with, and I’ve made use of in the screenie below, not sure if it will stick around after release.

Trading

You can view what people want or are offering and set up trade relations all through the interface, though the chat channels work quite well too. Here I’m trading one unit of agriculture for a unit of currency. The transportation/freight capacity shows how much I can ship total — this is using up 1/10. Step two invloves setting a duration, in days, for the trade agreement — I’m thinking this is real time, haven’t really delved into it too deeply.

The other social aspect is, of course, your avatar and the chat channels:

Avatar

Looks rough? It is… but to be fair it’s a pretty minor aspect of the game, so far. There is an avatar park you can build but is quite expensive, seems like there might be other such items to add to your cities for you and your friends to enjoy. Really though, this is a pretty minor part of the game and all you get to do is click around your city to see different things and do some emotes (the chicken dance is included, and as far as I am concerned no further work should be done on avatars — the chicken dance is all that is needed).

While the avatar portion of the game is rough, the rest is pretty smooth. There’s still typo’s and some bugs but it plays like a city builder should. It’s still too early to say much about the potential of the game, it is certainly there, but a niche success is quite possible. I’m just very happy the dev’s decided to think outside the MMO box when creating this game, and hope others will follow suite (not with more city building MMOs, but with non-action oriented ones, or non-hotkey spamming ones).