I'm a long-time fan of city builders. I've played countless hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4. I loved the technical depth of SimCity 4 but felt the game was feeling a bit aged. I am hoping CitiesXL can live up to everyone's high expectations.
I played through the tutorial and gathered some thoughts on the game. Feel free to respond however you'd like. Just note that this is not a formal review, but more of a brainstorm.
Pros:
Game looks visually appealing. Much-needed upgrade over older SimCity series.
Non-rectangular zoning opens up a whole new creative aspect to city-building.
I like the "waiting" mouse cursor with the spinning blue circles.
Cons:
Should not have to log in before playing in single player mode.
No desktop or Start Menu icons created during installation.
Much of the in-game text is far too small running at 1680x1050. I have better than 20/20 vision and it's difficult for me to read the text.
Game needs more street level sound effects to increase immersive experience. I feel disconnected from my city.
Need a tool to more accurately control curvature of roads. e.g., 90-degree curves, specify a radius, etc.
Game should support any zoom level. Rather than fixed zoom levels, let the mouse wheel smoothly zoom in and out.
Bridge tool is a bit awkward with regards to setting the elevation. The shift+drag feature causes the mouse cursor to quickly become out-of-sync with the cube indicating road elevation.
Middle mouse+drag should allow rotation around the x-axis. Right now I can't get a good view of what's under my bridges unless I enter postcard mode, and when I do that the zoom levels are too discrete.
A click+drag bulldozer mode would be nice, in order to more easily bulldoze anything within a bounding box.
Although I can appreciate the humorous touch given to the tutorial banter between the Mayor and Kevin, I think the game could've benefited from a more straight-forward, technical approach to learning.
The use of percentages throughout the game is meaningless. Why not simply use colored bubbles or some kind of gradient fill box to indicate satisfaction?
The red/green employment indicators should remain when using the Jobs (Economy) tool. Right now, it will only remain for a few seconds. This causes me to have to re-select the tool while I plan where to place my zones.
It's somewhat difficult to create 100% free-form agricultural, fuel, etc. areas.
Not clear what the blue and brown lines leading to and from buildings indicate. I'm assuming it's traffic flow, but more detail would be helpful.
Oftentimes when I "land" a bridge at one end, I am unable to junction a road to the bridge. I am forced to bulldoze the bridge and start again.
Tool windows tend to overlay each other. Suggested improvement would be to only allow a single tool window to be open at one time.
Bugs:
Mouse cursor scrolls outside of full-screen game window in a dual monitor configuration.
Bottom of some in-game text is cut off.
The View Options tool (as well as other tools) cannot be accessed when constructing something, but the tools themselves do not disappear. Instead, whatever you're constructing appears behind the tools.
Why is the Bulldozer tool listed as "Decoration?"
Flashing orange bounding box that is displayed when using construction tools does not properly sync with the changing size and location of the tool icons.
Flashing orange bounding box frequently remains on screen even though its tool window has disappeared.
See attached image for an avenue bug I discovered.
