Ok, i've tried the game too. First, i made a trail account. It ended. I made a new one, and i bought the limited edition of the game last friday for reasonable price. So roughly i've been playing this game for about 2 weeks on a regular basis. I also own Simcity 4 Deluxe, and i love this game despite of its obvious shortcomings (as stated above)
My overall opinion of Cities XL is that it is not what i expected it to be. Surely, there are some positive sides to it, but the negatives (for me personally) wipe the floor with these positives.
Lets start with my positive comment on the game;
* Graphics look good
* Tools for building roads and bridges are perfect (not counting the unable to connect to road bug)
* Bus system looks promising
And also the negative ones;
* Too many glitches in the end result for roads. When i make a triangle of avenues, and use the free building tool for any type of zone within that triangle, the game often gives overlapping roads in the corner of the triangle with the smallest angle. It looks like roads are built on top op each other. Similar problems occur when i built highway over a slightly inclining hill, at some bits, the road disappeared below the surface.
* When i try to use the leisure overlay to see what inhabitants do not have enough of this resource, all the buildings are bright green, and thus it is impossible to see what houses need addtional leisure
* The well-known problem of contracts in PO lasting for just 5 days
* I bought the game to also try the solo mode. I was thinking about making a seperate city for every resource. So, the plan was to make an agricultural city, a dirty industry city (air poll.) and a city with clean stuff like offices and HT industry. I made some small cities with alot of excess resources, thinking i could trade these with my other cities. But to my amazement i could only trade with Don Madalff, so there's my whole idea, straight into the toilet. I prolly should have read the FAQ on the site better, but still i find it strange that this feature one would expect in the game (as it follows idea set in online mode) isn't there.
* The game is incomplete. It is like building a sandbox city. It doesnt feel alive at all. (no public transport, no ships (have never seen any ships at my harbor)
* I got excited about the idea of playing Cities XL in solo mode with the new bus system, as without it, the game is rather boring. So i checked the site on the details of the buses, and the site said, only for Planet Offer... So i figured, i'll buy one month worth of planet mode, and then, as i payed for this "extra" feature, i could also use it in solo mode. But none of that, you can't. If i want buses i have to stay a PO-subscriber for the rest of my life..
* Parks; when i had built a large part of my city, filling about 1/4 of the map, i decided to try and beautify my city by adding parks and plazas. So i used the park tool, but to my amazement it had a size limitation, and had to be enclosed by roads.. So i had to lay fake roads to decrease the size of empty land and then lay some parks, delete the roads again. Far too much work for laying parks..
* Holidays. This point shares alot of its characteristics with the sandbox comment earlier. When i made some holiday hotels on one of my maps, i noticed they had to be placed in a certain area which became smaller after i placed a hotel in that area, much like ground water. As i obviously needed more than one hotel to satisfy the need for holidays in a 1M city, i had to build more. But because of the shrinking of the green overlay view for holidays, i had to place my hotels at weird places to get the most out of these zones. The end result is awful, and totally unrealstic and ugly, as the hotels are apart and can only be connected by roads and the empty zones with parks, cuz when i fill the remaining space with anything else the satisfaction of the hotels goes down.
* When i click a tool, lets say the building uneducated workers zones, the sound in the game goes ballistic. It makes the clicking noise of the mouse like 7 times in a row in very fast succession.
* Sometimes, after reaching certain goals or quantities, the game rewards you with a multiplier building or other special building, like the Ford dealership or the Kodak stuff. But the weird thing is that these buildings are not always under the menu from which to build them. Sometimes the 4th icon of special buildings (denoted with a star), following the high density stuff is gone, and i have to click the main menu several times switching between the utilities and city services buttons and finally back to the office screen, hoping the special building button now DOES appear.
* Lack of demographics and feedback on inhabitants; Why should i build a school when there is no indication about age groups or education levels. Also, normally one would presume a child attending school until he/she was 18, would move out of the uneducated workforce, and into the educated workforce, and the same could apply for educated ppl who earn a promotion. This whole concept is not in the game, so why educate ppl? (Or presume the unqualified workers only let their childern attend primary school, the qualified workers only primary and secondary, and so on)
* The online part of the game is only there to milk it dry for cash. The added content is far too pricy for what u get, and arguing the rest of the online stuff is key to this game, is idiotic. It is no more than a trade system (which fails due to the short lifespan of contracts) and a IRC type of community.
Summarizing, i think this game still needs alot of work, and at this point is no more than a payed beta, in which the players pay to make it a complete product, but only if they continue paying for it. (If you cease paying for the content, you don't get it anymore, like it is software on (extremely expensive) rent (12*8 euros=96 euros annually, far too much if u ask me for the content offered) Also, i dont get the impression MC is very involved with their customers, as i read the 3month and 2month offers disappeared from their site without further explaination why this happened, and just left player paying more per month. (no sorry, nothing)
