You can't actually build a city for yourself instead of you have to manage the already built cities. but it's pretty much an awesome job compare with most of great titles. I advice you never compare cities XL with this one cause in cities you build and manage so basically you can do both parts but in this game you only perform the managing part which I suppose allowed developers to focus for adding more features. there are lot of cool features example helicopters, planes, boats which you will never see in cities XL. guess you can try our if you really interesting to manage a real city. graphics ain't awesome. it has old fashion Sims 2 graphics guess it has at least shader model 2 rendering method that's why water looks shinny and realistic bit.
UI is simple and easy to learn plus it gives to tips how to go through the UI if it's hard to figure out by yourself.
