The biggest problem Cities XL has is gameplay flipping. The game really wants you to manage your city in ways that will make it extremely efficient and pushes forward a macro-strategic model, but it also wants you to individually manage businesses and traffic and environment at the same time. While it encourages you to improve your city in large expansive ways, it then comes out of nowhere to try and make you take a deep look at individual businesses or production. This is a huge problem, and makes playing the game very intimidating. After all, when you have to manage several dozen things at once on both a macro and micro level, you can end up a little confused.

Another major problem with Cities XL is the lack of a public transportation option. In a game where a good portion of the management comes from transportation issues, there's not a lot of ways to change this outside of just building more roads. This is a major disappointment, and while it's most likely these options will be included in later updates or DLC packages, they should have been included with the original game. No buses, no taxis, no subways, nothing. The closest you can get is through rail lines, which are used more for freight and outside transportation than actual public transportation within your city.

Finally comes the issue of framerate. Running on a high-end computer, Cities XL chugs when faced with the simplest of tasks, such as changing the elevation of a road or zooming in all the way. The graphics, even on the highest settings, really don't look all that great, especially if you use the aforementioned zoom to look at all of the rather ugly people. It's certainly not a good looking game by any stretch of the imagination, and the framerate issue just accentuates this fact even more.

Overall, Cities XL is an attempt to usurp the SimCity franchise from its throne as the master of the city simulation. Unfortunately, it is only an attempt, and manages to introduce cool new features while simultaneously botching essential ones. It is purely average, nothing more, and nothing less. While city simulation fanatics may find a lot to like here, it will undoubtedly be colored by the bad taste of mishandled gameplay mechanics. Those not in the realm of simulation fans should look elsewhere for a game to hold their attention.