Comparing Cities XL and City Life

[sparky66 0]

I have played SC4 for a long time now and have been looking for a new city building game. I was contemplating buying City Life but then i heard about Cities XL. My question is what features does each of them have and what is better. Bearing in mind i only play single player. also does City Life have mass transport (e.g. buses, trains) because it doesn't look like Cities XL will for single player. Also i have found 3 versions of city life, City Life, City Life 2008 edition and City Life Deluxe. Which is best?

[Androv 6]

 I played ordinary City Life back when it came out.  Made quite a large city on one of the maps, but never really got further into it.  Mass transit was limited (I think there were buses?  but definitely no trains).  My citizens enjoyed killing each other, and it was quite tricky because you needed all the classes to make things work properly.  It was very difficult to get past a certain point (getting the higher socioeconomic classes) but once they arrived money was plentiful and you could basically do what you wanted.

It was possible to make some very pretty cities  The colour coding of citizens was a bit ... interesting ... but it made the neighbourhoods work well together.  One of the graphical issues was the giant footpaths found on small roads.  This looked ugly but allowed the road to be upgraded to something larger later on.  Cities XL makes this more difficult (and realistic) by having smaller footpaths but preventing upgrading of the road.

Cities XL has curved roads, but as I don't have the full version yet I can't say what else it improves on.  I don't know if the unqualified workers will try to kill the elites yet  But the unqualified workers and professionals seemed to get along ok in the 2 minutes before my population cap in the demo was exceeded.  This makes it a bit more playable and less colour coded - one of my biggest difficulties was trying to make a certain area pink and the neighbouring areas white and red, which stopped the burning.

The 'zones' in both games are similar it would seem (variants on 2x2, 3x3, and some special cases).  But there is a bit more variety in the types of houses / businesses that pop up - if I remember correctly City Life only had 2 types of large factory, whereas Cities XL has a huge range.

I think if you were going to go for one, I'd wait for Cities XL as it has a lot of extra features not found in City Life.

[DazzaDazza 29]

Yah you should wait until CXL is out, although city life is O.k. its not a grate game. Its a bit boring but it all depends on what you like in a city builder, cites XL is a good game although it need some improvements it is far more enjoyably then City life.

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]