Much like its name suggests, Cities XXL is a city simulator of grand proportions that has the player fabricating entire, sprawling metropolis' inside a world that you created. With the assistance of an AI who looks like he came straight from the noughties, you'll be up and running, right after you've learned everything about the game in the tutorials.

And the tutorials will probably keep you busy for the best part of an hour, because of the tedious story dialogue and extensive pointless monologue. Which is strange because when you're done with the tutorials no other messages will ever grace your screen when you actually start to create your first city.

Cities XXL gives you an entire world to mould to your experimentation, it offers a variety of locales and difficulty settings for you to try. Ranging from 20%, very easy, all the way up to 100%, where you might struggle to even set up housing. But have you ever wanted to build a ski resort, or perhaps a seaside town or maybe even a dense, sprawling city? Now you can. But only after some serious grinding.

This city simulator demands immense respect from the players, it's entire system is built around going slowly and it can be mind bending how long you might take on doing something menial like building homes around your offices because your skilled workers aren't happy with the available housing. However, once you spent enough time on one city, building it up, creating new work and maybe branching out into new enterprises, you can start all over again.

Inter-city trade and overseas commerce are entirely possibly after you create more than one city with a population greater than 500,000 inhabitants. Which isn't exactly easy to obtain mind you, even the most basic of problems can stunt a city's growth, stopping you from achieving any of the milestones. Something as basic as a road that doesn't connect correctly can stop every single citizen from moving into your city.

Aside from some of the poor mechanics that can stop the player from truly enjoying themselves, the music does itself no favours either. The tracks range from ambient, actually quite relaxing, songs that feature people saying the phrase 'da' an awful lot, to strangely funky and almost out of place songs that just don't fit the style of the game at all. Seriously, music is a huge part of any game and the fact that nobody at Monte Cristo studios, the developers, chose to change the soundtrack up just to fit the game, is a little irritating.

I say this because Cities XXL isn't actually a direct sequel to the former Cities XL released in 2009, it's more of a massive update. The game added new functions like measuring air pollution, different building environments for the player to build on and several patches aimed at improving the original experience.

All these new additions however, are only noticeable if you unlock or use them after many, many hours of game play. A multiplayer feature from Cities XL was shut down unfortunately during 2010, because I really feel that the game could have really benefited from this, as other players could come into your world and help with the construction of any of your cities.

Despite what Cities XXL doesn't do for the players, it's a city simulator of fantastic proportions that does actually accurately show how a large scale business functions, however, it lacks any further depth. If you could directly micromanage retail and similar functions with other players in a larger scale world then it would be an amazing game, as it stands though, it's something that you really have to work at in order to be truly rewarded.

   Cities XXL                                               * * * * *