Normally, online worlds embrace the fantastical. From World Of Warcraft’s comprehensively detailed fantasy to Albatross18’s cheerful, nonsensical dreamland, MMOs eschew the real world in favour of something we can lose ourselves in. Cities XL, however, offers an online world that is very much grounded in reality. It’s a massively multiplayer city simulation game, and aims to emulate a real-world economy by giving players control of everything from the colour of their city’s street signs to international commerce.

Interestingly, Cities XL functions perfectly well as an offline product, too. Out of the box you get a comprehensively detailed, good-looking modern city sim that provides a huge amount of potential entertainment on its own. There will be over 500 different buildings at launch with which to construct your personal metropolis, and having seen the 3D, real-time building tools in action, we’re confident that they will satisfy the ever-meticulous demands of simulation gamers. Like other city sims, it’s a game of resource management and gradual expansion – building on different sorts of terrain affect the resources that are available to your city, which naturally alters the gameplay.

Sign up for the €5 monthly charge (or €12 for three months), however, and Cities XL transforms into an MMO. You get five plots of land on one of the game’s globes, which act as servers and house a few thousand other cities. You can’t simply transfer your offline city into the online game – instead, the resources available to you are determined by the other players nearby, as well as terrain. This means that every resource in the online game will come from another player’s city, giving Cities XL subscribers the chance to create and maintain their very own player-dependent global economy.

Build an oil production centre, for instance, and your city might become a focal point for the local economy as you establish trading relations with all the other players nearby. Imagine playing other cities off against each other in order to negotiate the best deal for a long-term resource deal, or just inviting other players into your city for a look around at your painstakingly created utopia. It’s easy to see how competing for resources and co-operating for trade would be a compelling hook for online players, although the community is going to have to be quite large and quite dedicated in order to pull it off. Online or offline, the city-building tools work the same way. Cities XL doesn’t use a grid system, instead it utilises a simple and elegant click-and-drag method for constructing everything from roads to bridges to rows of buildings. As you drag the mouse, the structure materialises in 3D, adapting automatically to the terrain, so there’s no tiresome fiddling around with building placement. The tools seem very flexible and enjoyable to use – Cities XL, like most games of this type, is designed for a broad and often busy audience, so MonteCristo has concentrated on making city building a pleasure, rather than a chore. Even offline, the game will be supported after launch with a huge amount of free new content – although, if we understood correctly, new buildings and the like will be available to subscribers first in order to tempt offline players into jumping into the online game. Aside from new buildings, the developer has also been playing around with situation-based challenges. ‘Gems’ – as the game calls them – provide many extra hours of entertainment, and a change of pace from the ordinary city-building.

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