What I have come to learn about my architectural skills as a city builder is that I always play it safe. I always zone neat, tidy areas for housing and work, I always put important services such as schools and hospitals in places where they have the maximum amount of coverage, and I always lay down roads in a way that congestion should hopefully be kept to the minimum, it all slots neatly in to place and it all works as well as I can hope for. But one thing I've learnt from my experiences from playing Cities XL is that as a city builder, while I might be practical, I'm also incredibly bland. I lack an imagination to make my city look less like a giant game of Tetris, and more like an actual living, evolving city-scape.

The standard of play here isn't that radically different from Monte Cristo's other management franchise City Life. You once again have to take a barren, lifeless plot of land and gradually construct a thriving metropolis on top of it, starting off by zoning in lower class housing and industry to set the foundations before attempting to reel in the more profitable social classes that will allow for the construction of more lucrative businesses, and gain you masses of profit with them. Unless you actively seek the ability to build every single building available through the games Expert Mode, Cities gradually eases you in by preventing you from building the more profitable of housing and businesses until a certain population limit has been reached.

As things progress and the number of citizens increases, you unlock the higher tier of workers who can bring in a lot of money, but also inflict a greater amount of demands forcing you to tackle issues such as the standard of the environment impact of your city, it's waste disposal management, the amount of energy you can provide not to mention having to increase the coverage of your emergency services and education. All this costs money, so rapid development means a delicate balancing act of ensuring you have enough profit coming in while providing and maintaining the demands of your citizens. It's hardly anything new, and if you are already familiar with City Life, you'll find the whole experience of Cities XL a comfortably familiar one.

Even if this is your first encounter with any type of city builder, the game is geared towards making the transition for new players as easy and painless an experience as possible. There are numerous tutorials that cover every aspect of the game from laying it's foundations to the trickier duty of keeping everything running. And it's all rounded off with a clear and informative interface that gives you the important need-to-know information in as easy to digest manner as possible, ensuring that the needs and desires of every class of citizen and business is told you so that any problems can be dealt with immediately.

Monte Cristo also take what they've learnt from City Life in creating a game that looks beautiful from practically any angle you look at it from. At bird's eye view you can see your city in it's entirety, as vast networks of zoned residential areas and office buildings, connected by huge road networks come into focus, zoom in to street level and you can actually see the streets teeming with life as busy pavements and roads pack with your citizens going about their day to day chores, whilst also giving you valuable insight into how well or badly your transit system is doing.

It brings your city to life in a way few city building games have done before, but it lacks in one vital aspect, there's absolutely no ambient sound whatsoever. Cars and pedestrians may heavily populate the world, but you'll never actually hear them, not the idle chit chat of people walking to the local supermarket nor the horns or sirens of many cars on the busy roads, it makes the street level view a surprisingly sparse place to visit regardless of how busy it may be.

The game itself isn't much of a departure from any other management game you may have played before, the big difference with this particular city builder is with it's online mode. Though playable offline (you will still need an Internet connection to activate and login in to the game) Cities XL comes into it's own in it's Planet Mode. This takes you to a virtual world, a huge globe littered with empty and occupied chunks of land that can be turned into thriving new cities. Choosing where to begin here isn't simple though, as each and every lot differs in terrain type and the resources it provides, ultimately altering just how easy or difficult it is to build and maintain a city on.

It's also on the Planet mode you'll notice the numerous other player made cities already up and running. Represented as green dots, user created cities already number in their thousands and densely populate the virtual planet, each as varied in their size and success than the other, the larger green dots often represent some of the most profitable, hugely populated cities in the game, they're also a place you often find yourself wandering towards, bitten by curiosity.

XL's avatar mode allows you to create your own virtual character who can be sent to explore and inspect the streets of other players cities. Actions here are limited to the use of a few emotes, you are simply a visitor there to spy on how other people play the game, and often what you see can give you both a mix of inadequacy and inspiration. It's incredible to see just how some people have crafted their cities to make the maximum use of the terrain, where streets and buildings twist and turn with the landscape. Compared with my own city that was crafted in a block by block fashion, I can't help but feel that I lack a certain creativity, it can be disheartening but at the same gives you a wealth of inspiration that forces you to adapt and experiment with ideas you wouldn't otherwise have considered.

More importantly however, being able to view how another persons city works gives you the opportunity to see just how they've managed to make is a success. Their ability to utilise businesses to their advantage or seeing just how some players have completely neglected the need for a population boom and instead lay down dozens of agricultural districts to manufacture food they then sell to other players. Whilst my own method of mayoral duty never really extends from the basics of making a living off taxations, I've already been toying with some ideas for maximising my annual profit that I likely would never have thought of using had I not had the opportunity to see how things can be done differently.

The additional online aspects of the game aren't just there to give you something to look at either, interaction with other users is a huge part of the Planet mode. Trade is an important part of XL, and like any MMO you can buy and sell resources on a market place between other players. Organised into Tokens, here you can sell of any resources you may have found yourself with no use for with the hope of making a tidy profit and helping out a neighbour who greatly needs that resource, likewise if your city is struggling because of a lack of a certain resource, purchasing it from the market place might be the only way for you to attain it without the need to spend an excessive amount of money trying to acquire it yourself. The intent is to get players communicating with one another, to get them to help each other out, it works on paper.

In practice however it's another matter. Although XL showcases just how well a game like this can adapt to the MMO template, it doesn't quite work as well as you'd hope. For starters content is fairly light. You're told throughout of how players will be able to work together to gain and construct Blueprints that will allow the building of famous landmarks, though these haven't been released yet, neither have the much touted GEM's, game modules that will add a management mini game that will allow you to build and maintain things such as Ski Resorts. Although it's a tantalising prospect, it too has yet to be released, furthermore, GEM's will cost you real money on top of the subscription charge you already have to pay in order to access the Planet Mode.

Given that it's roughly £7 a month to play online, you'd think that something such as the GEM's would be released for free, particularly when content so far is on the sparse side and what services you do get tend to feel unfinished. About the only real advantage at the moment beyond snooping in other peoples cities is with the ability to trade with other players. This shows the potential of making a game like Cities with the online aspects of an MMO.

The problem is that trade currently doesn't work as well as it should do. For starters it's still fairly buggy, with transactions made needlessly complicated thanks to certain actions either not working properly or just the design of the whole thing making it difficult to actually trade with other players in as easy a manner as possible. It's also saddled with the fact that while busy from it's active community, practically everyone is selling the same thing making it hard to work the market place to your advantage and make a profit. There's potential here certainly, but currently the Planet Mode just doesn't quite seem to provide the content it needs to in order to justify it's monthly fee.

The more experienced of gamers already familiar with the likes of Sim City and City Life might also find that the pandering to a more causal audience also makes Cities XL a little too easy. It's hard to get into any kind of financial difficulty in the game, the only time I've ever found myself racing to avoid bankruptcy was by my own rather silly decision to build a huge suburb of executive housing before I had enough money coming in to build the services they required. Most of the time I could zone in huge swathes of housing and business without worrying about loosing any cash. It'll make it easier for newcomers to the genre to play, but also removes allot of the challenges people come to these sorts of management games for.

There's work that clearly needs to be done, and if Monte Cristo pull out all the stops over the next few weeks Cities XL might approach something closer to it's true potential than what is currently on offer. As it stands, in it's current state, there's still not enough that justifies repeated visits once the free 7 day trail expires. Even the single player mode feels tacked on rendering what should have been one of this years must have management games as something you might want to sit and wait on. It's still a good game though, easy to fall into and addictive once you've worked out how things work, but unless this is a genre you are already in love with, then it might pay to sit an wait until content has padded out a bit more and Cities XL justifies it's continued annual subscription charge.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).