While you do construct some specific buildings, like schools, police stations, and high-rise hotels, most of the time, you're drawing huge runs of city blocks that soon become home to apartment buildings and Dunder Mifflin-styled office complexes.
You have godlike control over every aspect of urban planning, which allows you the freedom to lay down residential, commercial, and industrial zones where homes, offices, factories, stores, and the like automatically pop up as soon as the dust clears. Mechanics follow the modern city-building template laid out in SimCity 4 back in 2003. So even though you're not following any sort of storyline, you are building cities that can work together. Instead, you freely go from one map to the next and develop cities that coexist as part of a shared global economy. As with the earlier games in the series, there is no campaign here.
CITIES XL 2012 MAP EDITOR HOW TO
Each comes with fairly distinct challenges that mostly involve how to best manipulate the terrain and how to deal with resource shortages in crucial areas like water and oil. Just about everything you could imagine is represented here, from fertile valleys and deserts to rocky wastelands and island paradises. You play virtual mayor of a budding burg on maps that represent terrain of all types found in every corner of the globe. The heart of the game still beats exactly as it did last year. This is pretty much the same game, albeit with around 300 new buildings (a mostly cosmetic change that gives neighborhoods a revamped look with things like deluxe waterfront homes) and 15 new maps on which to ply your city-building talents. If you're familiar with Cities XL 2011, then surprise, you're already familiar with Cities XL 2012. Life in the burbs comes with some new building designs in Cities XL 2012.
CITIES XL 2012 MAP EDITOR UPGRADE
While the publisher is making no secret that this is more of an expansion than a full-blown sequel and is offering an upgrade to owners of last year's game for $15, there still isn't enough fresh content to warrant a purchase. This game is a complete rehash of Cities XL 2011, with only some new buildings and maps added to the feature set. But there is one big problem: You've seen it all before. Developer Focus Home Interactive does an impressive job on this big picture, too, thanks to a wide variety of map terrain and a straightforward interface that make it easy to build the metropolis of your dreams.
Cities XL 2012 simplifies the messy rigmarole that comes with running a municipality you eliminate things like labor problems, uptight councillors, and calls from angry residents about raccoons getting into garbage cans in favor of focusing on urban planning. Playing a virtual mayor may be a lot more enjoyable than doing it in the real world.