Though you’d reasonably expect any future generation of city-building games to exceed predecessors in scale and scope, it’s difficult not to feel a little sense of wonder as the camera pans smoothly down from a satellite view to ground level – a ground level that is alive with pedestrians and vehicles. Even once the shock of the new wears off, however, Cities XL proves it knows the genre well. Its building tools are powerful and ergonomic, allowing you to draw your city with huge freedom. Roads are created fluidly, with the ability to manually assign the number of lanes and even their direction. As you tug a bridge across a channel, it grows the structurally appropriate number of legs and arches required for its length. The economic makeup of a city is as vital as its physical layout – rich citizens think themselves too good for public transport and won’t want to live more than 30 minutes from work.

If this detail is a baseline necessity for a current-generation city-building game, then the real innovation in Cities XL is the implementation of online, bringing urban planning into a global ecosystem populated by the competing cities of other players. There’s everything you’d expect from a subscription MMOG in terms of persistence and socialisation, but the dev team has thought carefully about how players’ creations affect one another, suggesting that entirely new avenues of play may be opened as users specialise their cities.

If EA is thinking of resurrecting the central line of the SimCity franchise then it may have to push its ambitions a little higher. Monte Cristo has added so much on top of the usual incremental cranking of detail and graphical polish that, if left unanswered, EA’s franchise might be in danger of finding itself buried in Cities XL’s foundations.