having played (and hated) Sim city Societies, I can tell this game is purely awesome. Graphics are absolutely beautiful and I love roaming the streets with the camera!

The token system makes trading really easy! You can make lots of money easily with everything you produce and you can specialize your city.

The only thing I didn't like (only because nothing is perfect) is that houses are built randomly, which makes it hard to create a neighborhood or series of buildings of the same type. You find yourself wasting minutes demolishing houses. :)

This game is truly great. The road network is excellent, specially the possibility of curved roads.

The trading system idea is also something that I really like. It makes more sense to specializing into certain resources that way.

The game gets a 5/5 from me. But sadly, there is a memory leak problem with the game that they aren't able to fix. It forces to exit the map and reload it every hour or so, otherwise it become laggy as hell.

Its truly sad that such a great game is getting killed by this memory lead problem.

For Mac gamers wondering whenever this would come up on Mac platform, I decided to give Wine a shot and try this…

It runs surprisingly well, for an emulated Windows environment game…

Onto the game: for SimCity lovers this is a must-have. I've been wanting to play a city builder on Mac but couldn't find any good game to fulfill my needs. SimCity 4 is way too glitched on Mac and hard as heck to find (also expensive).

1 - Graphics are amazing. But on a Mac, running it under a new early-2011 MacBookPro 17" (Radeon HD 6750M 1GB, 8gb RAM, 2.2 i7 quad core) it runs sluggish with shadows on. So, turn off the shadow effects and it should run normally. DirectX also tends to crash from time to time, no big deal, just so you know since OS X does not have DirectX support, this would happen sooner or later.

2 - Gameplay-wise, this is as fun as any SimCity. Differences are: no water pumps required, neither power plants. The city "buys" these resources and of course, if there's no resource in town, they become expensive. No water pipes, underground view, power lines, etc. Everything is connected via roads and streets. Unlockable buildings show up as you progress. The whole game is based on resources (such as both water and electric energy, and also waste, food, retail, people to work on places, etc). You can trade with your other cities to overcome any surplus or lack of any of those resources. No laws or petitions, but with mods you may overcome any trouble like air pollution problems (which can't be reduced in game). Mods are awesome in these cases. The more I play, the more depth I can see in this awesome sim game. You create bus-lines and each stop, change road directions. You can choose whatever building you want to build or simply let the citizens build on their own. Zooming until you can walk in the streets and look at the buildings as if you were really there. But there's also lack of simple things like creating a lake is impossible (but thanks to mods you can do that making plazas "pretending" it's water).

All in all, this is a truly great game and it runs nicely on a Mac.

For those Mac gamers wondering how to do this, use Wineskin, update to the latest engine, install DirectX9 and the game via Wineskin. Make an .app file and run as if it were an OS X app. Simple as that!!!

This game absolutely rocks. i have been a big Sim City fan for years, never being able to get enough micro managing my Sims etc. this game not only brings the genre back but IMHO brings allot more to the table. there are some bugs granted and some flaws here and there but over all this game was put together not for the faint of heart. If you like building things and tearing them apart just to upgrade, re-build or just plain start over then this is the game for you. i just honestly hope they make some expansions for the game!

Cities XL continues where Sim City 4 left off. This game really deserves more attention then it has. It is far more versatile and fun than Sim City 4. Plus the camera functions are infinetely better than in Sim City 4. You can change you view all the way to ground level and have 360 rotation. You can even see for lack of a better word, your "sims."

The graphics of this game are excellent, except for the people when you zoom in too closely. However, it just doesn't have the depth and realism of such older titles as Sim City 4. Basically, its great if all you want to do is build an aesthetically pleasing city, but not so good if you want a realistic city building experience.

This game isn't the easiest to learn, but it is fun. I have enjoyed it. Sometimes it gets hung up, but not for long. I'd like to get rid of Omnicorp the big corporation in the game. I am finally learning to create more than one city at a time and trad with them instead. Perhaps this will work.

The game takes a really long time to download. I wish it didn't take up as much ram but I think its the best city building game I've played. The graphics are amazing but slow on my laptop even though its a pretty good hp laptop and Core I5.

It would probably work better on a desktop better.

I tend to get sick of city games after a few hours but not yet with this one. Still trying to figure everything out.