The only real gripe had with the title is the nearly complete lack of a formal tutorial, which is occasionally compounded by the fact that the bottom right of the screen shows tips on how to improve your city that aren't always immediately intuitive or understandable. There is a written tutorial in the manual that does a good job of showing how to build a balanced starting city but it touches on none of the more advanced topics. The in-game tutorial menu does touch on those topics but is little more than a series of short paragraphs alongside rather tiny and grainy videos that really don't do much to help explain them. Between the two they do establish a decent base of knowledge to help the player learn the basics but at the same time there simply will be times where some players will be left frustrated and confused at certain aspects of building and growing their cities with little more to learn from than sheer trial and error.
City Life: World Edition does score high marks in its presentation of the game world. When you zoom out you can see your entire city at once and see it color coded to the various types of citizens that live and work in it, but the majority of gameplay is probably spent at the middle zoom levels where you can see many of your city's buildings and detail. Each citizen type constructs their homes and businesses in a different and unique style, and each type has more than one model that is chosen at random to help break up the monotony of having 20 buildings next to each other that all look identical. It all adds up to making your city look like a living, organic world rather than a series of identical structures. You can even zoom in all the way to street level and move around to easily see people walking down your streets, eating at picnic tables in their backyard, and other detailed views of your city. Though there isn't a true day/night cycle you can set the lighting to dawn, day, evening, or night which all look quite representative of what you would expect from their real-life counterparts. City Life: World Edition's interface is deserving of praise as well as nearly every aspect of it has an informative tool-tip, a “?” button in the corner for expanded information on it, and the ability to hide chunks of it outright to let the player concentrate on building their city.
The musical score however is not quite as praiseworthy as other aspects of the title as it quickly becomes somewhat repetitive in nature, if not outright obnoxious. It's not that it isn't cheery or upbeat but rather that it is unabashedly and overbearingly so; even while your citizens are generally unhappy and largely unemployed. The only other audio aspect heard in City Life: World Edition is that of the various sound effects heard while building your city and navigating the interface, the majority of which are tastefully used and fit the title's overall feel.
City Life: World Edition isn't a perfect city simulation title, but at the same time it is an extremely important addition to the genre; if not simply to infuse it with new ideas then at the very least to give SimCity some much-needed competition. The title does have quite compelling gameplay and it can be incredibly easy to get sucked in for more hours than you had intended just because you had gotten wrapped up in your next grand plan for the city's expansion. At the same time there will be a good chunk of time at the beginning of the game and various times throughout that players will be in want of some sort of guiding hand to explain some of the more complex aspects of building their city that doesn't really exist. Once you pass the initial learning curve however City Life: World Edition has gameplay that is largely involving and deep enough that both newcomers to and fans of the genre will find a lot in the title to keep them playing hours after they had intended to stop for the evening.
