There are 64 building points, enabling you to build 64 different cities. Once you’ve clicked on play, you are taken to a rather interesting-looking planet this planet only has three continents, all of which have a Pangaea-like appearance. Once you’ve conquered these challenges, and impressed the mayor and Kevin, you can move on to the main game. While the tutorials are not compulsory, I would suggest you complete them to better understand the interface and where everything is found. The two of them guide you through the 10 different tutorials giving you a decent overview of the game and a detailed enough guide to be able to enjoy the game without being too deeply challenged.
You are introduced to a rather stereotypically useless mayor and his over-worked, under-credited assistant Kevin. It provides a thorough overview of the game’s basic and advanced features – and I did not find myself being frustrated by not being able to complete tasks. The in-game tutorials section is rather entertaining.
I’ll concede that I don’t have a state-of-the-art PC that could put a render farm to shame – however when the game’s minimum system requirements is a single core 2.5 GHz CPU with 1GB RAM and a 512MB GFX, one would think that I could easily play this game on a mid-range setting with my setup.īut it would appear that this assumption, much like being a Springbok/Arsenal/Sharks/Mercedes supporter, is very, very wrong.
To call this game resource intensive is a gross understatement – to call it a resource *insert derogatory term for prostitute* is still being kind.
The game has one cool feature which allows you to zoom into a “Sims-like” one-to-one view the thing is, whether you’re running max graphics with full anti-ailiasing, or just running on stripped-down software mode, the ground view almost looks the same – barring a few rather undetailed textures. It could have been absolutely mind-blowing, but sadly due the fact that Focus Home Interactive might be stronger publishers than developers, there is some poor quality in certain key aspects of the game. This is the part where I’m supposed to say “until now” but sadly, er, no.Ĭities XL 2012 is a good game – not great, not fantastic, but a nice way to waste some time if you’re suppressing latent town-planner tendencies. Simcity 2000 was the benchmark, and no Sim game has even come close for me.
It brought back memories of sitting behind my Windows 95 PC, building cities and then sadistically destroying my poor Sims with natural disasters and Godzilla – incinerating them into nothing more than extremely large pixelated dust. Before I received this title, I decided to fire up my a copy of SimCity 2000 so I installed DOSbox and away I went.