It doesn’t help that the multiplayer portion of the game has been reportedly plagued with connection and stability issues. Though I had only a couple of problems in my early sessions, the game’s lobby was full of people complaining about trade contracts lost between sessions and general connectivity. There are gluts in some resources that still have to be hammered out, but this might mean nerfing city plans that have been in the works for weeks. The interface is unresponsive at the best of times – even in solo games, so successfully grabbing that electricity or waste disposal contract can be iffy.

Probably the biggest disappointment is a legacy of Monte Cristo’s history. Though not perfect by any means, its City Life was a truly original creation that forced you to balance the needs of very different types of citizens that would not always get along with each other. Cities XL has rich and poor but there doesn’t seem to be much reason not to stick them all together cheek by jowl. More than any other recent city builder, Cities XL becomes about the numbers more than the city. The promise of building the city we wanted to build runs aground on the fact that so many cities end up looking the same with a few variations in the terrain.

New content including some game changing modules are promised for future release, but at this point Cities XL is more an intriguing concept than a revolutionary title. The solo game is inferior to many other city builder options in recent years (Tropico 3, SimCity: Societies, Grand Ages: Rome) and the online portion is too underdeveloped and uninteresting to recommend it to serious amateur urban engineers. It’s still a daring idea. If it only were as daring in execution.