Today marks the official launch of Cities XL across Europe and other areas, including the UK, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Australia and New Zealand. North American players are going to have to wait until tomorrow to get their hands on the sim-building MMO, although there's still time to pre-order the limited edition on Steam and Direct2Drive.

In addition, Monte Cristo has published the second Cities XL gameplay presentation video. The first one focused mainly on the solo mode, while this one shows off the online portion of the game. Here's some more details from the post: "With the Planet Offer, you can play online with other mayors, either from the game or from the website, in order to trade resources, visit their cities, build new friendships and collaborate to enhance your cities' attractiveness and efficiency.

The announcement regarding the European release can be found after the jump.

London, England – October 8th. CITIES XL, the highly polished city-building game from Monte Cristo Multimedia, hits the stores today in UK, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, Australia and New Zealand, courtesy of distributor Namco-Bandai. In the solo mode, you can build from a selection of 500 buildings on varied landscape maps. In the online mode – subject to a monthly subscription - you can collaborate to build famous landmarks, trade resources with other players, and get monthly new content such as new building packs. The game has an RRP of £29.99.

In Cities XL, you build up your city in resplendent 3D from a selection of 500 buildings, whilst trying to keep your population happy – in the beta, players have managed to get up to 17,000,000 inhabitants in one city! You have to take account pollution, traffic, trade and class to build that perfect city.

Cities are built on amazing 3D maps (such as Mount St Helens), and the game really reflects that impressive scale, letting you zoom out to a Google Earth perspective or right into street level to watch your inhabitants going about their day.

If you want, you can go online and build your city on a planet with up to 10,000 other cities per planet. Here you can trade excess resources, chat with friends, specialize your city to corner your local market, or build Megastructures that aren’t available in the single-player game.

For more information about CITIES XL, please visit www.citiesxl.com.