My new Demoman column is up at Shacknews: Cities XL.
I actually rather enjoyed the demo. Building is fun and easy, and watching the city spring up and come to life is satisfying. The tutorial is pretty easy to follow and gets you on your way to creating an attractive little city, which I did twice. Both cities ultimately failed, and failed pretty quickly, but I’m still keen to try again (the demo lasts for 7 days).
There are two things potentially keeping me from buying the game. First, the online aspect: I’m not terribly interested in playing this game with other people, and definitely not interested in paying a subscription fee for the honor of trading resources with other cities. I can see the appeal of being on a planet with thousands of other player-made cities, but not so much that I want to keep paying for it.
The other downside of playing online is connection problems and lag — I didn’t experience much of this in the demo (occasional lag, and I got booted once), but still, I just want to build roads and office towers and factories, so why deal with even occasional dropped connections and lag if I can just play offline? Luckily, it sounds like you can just buy a standalone, offline version to play solo, which I’m still considering doing.
The other thing keeping me from pre-ordering is that the game itself is a little hard to figure out. My city seemed to exist in one of two states at any given time: everything is going great, or everything is in the shitter. My city flopped back and forth between these two states quickly, and often, and I didn’t always know why. I might notice that the offices didn’t have enough workers, so I would build more housing: sometimes it fixed the problem, sometimes it didn’t. There wasn’t a whole lot of indication exactly why things were going wrong and how to improve them. Granted, there are all sorts of stats and graphs and stuff I didn’t really delve into, so it may just be that the answers were there but I just don’t know how to find them yet.
Eventually, with both cities I created, I reached a point where I was unable to do anything to improve things. Businesses found my city unappealing due to lack of workers, workers found my city unappealing due to lack of businesses, and without both, there was no money to satisfy either. Maybe I was just building too fast, but the speed in which things sour kind of encouraged me to. “The happy arrow is suddenly pointing down! Things are turning red and red is bad! Build! Build like the wind!”
Still, pretty cool demo. You should check it out if you liked Sim City way back when.
27 Comments
September 15, 2009
First! also I’m definately going to get this demo now
September 15, 2009
Holyfuckingshitanupdate
September 15, 2009
Please consider playing and writing about the Tropico 3 PC demo if you enjoy building stuff and watch it grow. :)
Unlike Cities XL apparently, Tropico 3 gives you the right feedback and informations most of the times (the Almanac is your friend).
September 15, 2009
Yeah, I dl’d Tropico: I’ll check it out later this week.
September 15, 2009
I’ve heard that mass transit won’t be available without the subscription, so I’d hold off on pre-ordering.
September 15, 2009
Hmmm. There are significantly more Demoman columns than I thought. I guess I should start checking Shacknews for them directly.
September 15, 2009
Definately checking this out, I still play Sim City 4…
September 15, 2009
Yay for updates!
Seems like an okay game, just what I’ve been looking for, something to just build in, but not actually have to do the building…
September 15, 2009
It’s a good sign when I start cracking up two paragraphs in. =D
September 15, 2009
Thanks for giving me the heads-up on the subscription charges Chris. Oh, and nice review!
September 15, 2009
Your offices may be having trouble selling themselves. Hover over the little button next to what they’re selling or buying, and it tells how hard/easy it is to obtain/sell something. If they’re having trouble selling themselves, I think you can build manufacturing districts which buy office stuff.
September 15, 2009
looks like all those professional review reviewers at Shacknews are finally warming up to you!
September 15, 2009
The game is utterly horrible. don’t buy it chris! don’t do it!
September 15, 2009
The subscription fee isn’t mandatory.
September 15, 2009
Hahaha, great review.
Hmm, I guess the game looks cool too, though I only go to Shacknews to read The Demoman.
September 16, 2009
This seems quite a lot like Sim City.
I hated Sim City Societies though.
This sounds good, too bad I’d lag unless I got the standalone.
September 17, 2009
Graphs are everything. Or at least that’s what I remember from SimCity 2000…
Anyway. An update. Why do you hardly ever update these days, Chris? :(
I remember an update every day or so back on 1fort. Now I know you don’t allways have the time, but even the official TF blog updates more often than you. And we can’t even complain about it because the comments get autolocked. I must n(ondrick)ag!
September 17, 2009
Oh, come on now. I’m sure Chris was just having fun on vacation… without us… Bastard.
I think I may try the demo, or just find an old Sim City. The one flaw that game was that it was impossible to beat. It should declare you the King of the World after 500,000 people.
September 18, 2009
I’d love to see a new citybuilder/dungeon keeper/socialist dictator-er that is like the old Settlers 2 games, complete with the same ability to play with it at your leisure. It’s a good game to run in DosBox under your main windows to mess with every few minutes or so. It’s just fast enough that your input is needed several times an hour, but just slow enough that you can work or go to the bathroom without worrying about pausing/saving. It’s the ideal workplace game, in that it’s rewarding and can be put off with little consequence.
September 19, 2009
I remember seeing a preview of this ages ago, it looked cool (I really dig games like these, I still play Roller Coaster Tycoon) and I like the idea of a multiplayer aspect. My issue is the subscription fee. But I haven’t actually tried the game yet, so I’ll have to get around to that.
Nice review, very funny.
September 20, 2009
Hmmm. only 21 comments. Do you think the long unexplained gaps between posts are to blame for lack of activity?
September 21, 2009
I am downloading Doodlejump right now. prepare for war, chris! :D
September 21, 2009
Bring it, Chilla!
September 21, 2009
Look what I found on the TF2 blog! And by found I mean looked at the main page!
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2851
Click the “Patent” thing for another link!
http://guarddog.50webs.com/
GUYS, IT’S A BRAND NEW CLASS!!!! AND ITS A GUARD DOG!
September 21, 2009
Guard dog for TF2?
http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2851 links to
http://www.teamfortress.com/1308.htm which links to
http://guarddog.50webs.com/
September 22, 2009
How come my post was held for moderation if there were only two links in it :\
September 22, 2009
SOB.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/94900-The-TF2-Guard-Dog-Update-All-Bark-No-Bite
:(
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