The history of city builders is dominated by one name Will Wright, he and his studio Maxis made the staples of the city building genre, Sim city, Sim city 2000, Sim city 3000 and Sim city 4 something happened though and there is has been a true sequel to the series yet.  What happened was Spore, a monster sized game which took up Maxis’s time and resources until its release in 2008.   Along comes Monte Cristo and their attempt at a city builder, City Life, they experimented with “classes” and “races” making it a bit more of a society manager unfortunately this was not the dirrention fans wanted the game to go in and City life replace Sim city 4 at the top of the city builder genre.  Meanwhile EA still owned the Sim City trademark and they were not about to let it depreciate so used another studio,  Tilted Wind Mills, to create “Sim City”: Societies.  Societies was aimed at the casual market and played very much like City life, it too did not topple Sim City 4.  In case Sim city 4’s popularity is in doubt I’ll just make one point, the torrent “SimCity 4 Deluxe w/ Crack & Serial” is still even after two years, in the top one hundred active torrents of the popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay.org.

All this makes the city builder genre very ripe, even a  ten year old player that started on Sim City 4 when it came out in 2003 will be nearly 17 once Cities XL hits the streets.  The age ranges just go up from there meaning that Monte Cristo has the potential to capture a mature  market without any competition.  This financial incentive is what the genre need since without it we would never see a city builder of the scale the genre demands.  Cities XL is set to be the giant game the fans are asking for and dreaming about.  The engine is full 3d, you can play online in a sort of MMO environment, the buildings can be placed at angles and bridges can be built at arbitrary locations.  The fact that it will be MMO means that Monte Cristo can and will continue to develop the game over time.

In short Cities XL is going to be the standard of the city builder genre for quite a while.