Cities XXL

Cities XXL is a city-building simulation from Focus Entertainment, released in 2015, positioning itself as the definitive entry in the Cities XL series. On paper the pitch is solid: 47 architectural styles, over 1000 building types, and maps large enough to theoretically rival real-world capitals. If you have spent time with SimCity or the Cities XL games, the loop will feel immediately familiar. You zone residential, commercial, and industrial areas, manage resource pipelines, balance your city budget, and watch traffic grind to a halt the moment your population cracks 100,000. The scale sounds impressive until you realize most of that building count is reskins spread across style packs that were already present in Cities XL Platinum. From a systems depth standpoint, this is where Cities XXL starts losing points fast. The economy model is shallow compared to what a strategy-sim fan would expect in 2015. There is no meaningful political layer, no regional interdependency worth puzzling over, and the budget management reduces to a single slider exercise once you find a stable tax rate. The traffic AI is genuinely bad, not in a charming emergent way but in a way that will have you rebuilding interchanges three times only to watch buses clip through each other on a one-lane roundabout. Late-game city management, which should be the payoff for all that early zoning work, is where the cracks widen most visibly. Performance degrades noticeably on larger maps, and the absence of any meaningful mod tooling at launch left the community doing workarounds rather than expansions. Here is where I would normally argue that a complex sim rewards patient newcomers willing to learn its systems. I cannot make that case here. The tutorial is perfunctory, dropping you into a map with minimal guidance and assuming familiarity with the XL lineage. Worse, there is no compelling depth waiting on the other side of that learning curve. Veterans of Cities XL Platinum will find Cities XXL offers almost nothing new beyond slightly larger map sizes, and newcomers would be far better served by Cities: Skylines, which launched the same month and outclassed this title in nearly every meaningful dimension. The 41 percent positive Steam rating and Metacritic score of 47 are not anomalies; they reflect a real consensus. The mod ecosystem, which could have saved this title, never materialized into anything robust. The community maintained some compatibility with older Cities XL mods, but the tools were never officially supported, and the pipeline for custom buildings and road types remained frustratingly opaque. For a genre where mods can extend a game's lifespan by years, that is a significant failure. There is a certain type of city-builder completionist who will extract value here purely from the building variety and the meditative loop of watching a skyline fill in, but that audience is narrow. If you are that person and you already own Cities XL Platinum, there is almost no reason to add this to your library.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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