The city-sim genre has been in decline for a while, or is at least going through a kind of transition. More than half a decade has passed since the last installment of SimCity (unless you count Societies, and you shouldn't). Maxis seems nearly out of the game at this point, and while elements of the genre sometimes show up blended with others, or in casual browser games, we don't see much in the way of major releases these days. Cities XL is practically the lone example this year, with the exception of oddities like Tropico 3, and it cleaves much more closely to the standards of the genre. A little too closely, perhaps.
Cities pretty much nails the basics, and in fact surpasses its predecessors with its snappy interface and noob-friendliness. Orienting roads and city zones is easier here than in any other game of its kind, and the game gradually introduces denser zoning and more advanced buildings as your city's population increases (though playing in expert mode will lift these limitations.) Meanwhile, the game comes off as more than a little generic in its presentation. You're never called on to make changes to public policy, tax rates are all flat, and while there are a crapload of different roads to lay down, roads are the one and only transportation option within the city. The result is that cities don't possess much individuality beyond basic issues of layout and efficiency. The mechanics of city planning and maintenance will be more than familiar if you've ever experienced any other example of the genre, and they remain as addictive as ever. There just aren't any surprises beyond that, especially when playing offline.
The game's chief innovation should be online play, which promises individual planets to populate and an exchange of commodities to establish with other city mayors. And upon first seeing a globe dotted with the lights of cities cris-crossed by lines of trade, it seems like a really neat idea. In practice, however, it seems more like an expensive nuisance. Goods your cities produce can be traded in the form of tokens in an online auction house, which would be fantastic but for the fact that all contracts expire at the end of five real-world days, resulting in economic collapse if you fail to pop online in time to renew them or forge new ones. Additionally, proposing trades to friends who aren't online at the moment is a complete and total pain in the ass. The catch here is that, especially for the more resource-strapped maps, trade is a near necessity, and the only way to go about it properly is with a subscription. If you want to set up trade networks among your offline cities, well, tough. And when they get around to adding buses and trains to the game, well, you'll need a subscription for that, too.
As one of the last of what seems to be a dying breed it's impossible to judge Cities harshly against its contemporaries, who just plain don't exist. It offers some significant improvements, especially in the areas of graphics and interface, which are both fantastic, while at the same time it's dragged down by the absence of features we've come to take for granted and a subscription based service that provides little more than a chat interface and a slightly wonky trading network. If city simming is something that appeals to your obsessive-compulsive tendencies, well, Cities won't disappoint. If, however, you're more interested in creating something that's very much your own and making it part of a world full of similarly unique creations, I'm sorry, but I don't think that'll be happening here.
