Played it till 3 am last night. Really like it.
I mean, I suck at it, but jeepers. It's fun.
What do you like so much about it, Quigs? All I see and read about the game points to dumbing down and scaling back. Twisty roads really don't seem like much of a positive difference compared to small cities, no airports, no arcologies, pre-order only buildings and so on. Not even mentioning the always on DRM.
The last one I played tons of was the SNES verison. Played other builders between then and now of course, the Anno series, that sort of thing.
I think the thing that ties it together for me is the choices you make while building your city, and the impact it has. I don't mean the water pollution stuff (Though I do think it's kind of neat), I mean dedicating your city towards a certain path.
My experience with the game lasted about 7 hours or so last night, (interrupted only by the girlfriend demanding a round of the Game of Thrones card game, I reccomend it), so I'll just go off that.
Build my town up. Create jobs. Have a bit of fun watching individual houses become more prosperous and try to move to a better house or upgrade their own. Decide early on to go green with wind energy, but my greed for residential zoning and poor early planning mean I end up dozing the wind turbines for extremely powerful coal power plants. Find out my first town has a bit in the way of natural resources, but it seems to late to exploit them, as I've already built the entire expanse of the plot allocated to me. End up tearing down some industrial parks and residential projects to slam a coal mining operation and an ore mining operation in the middle of the damn city. This doesn't do any favors to my already overburdened transportation infrastructure. Meanwhile, because I've been pouring all my money into getting these new plants up and running, My town up and got dumb on me. There aren't enough skilled migrant laborers coming to Quigsville, and my one grade school doesn't have enough seats.
So I start up a second town, where my focus will be residential and education, all green energy this time, and plenty of public transport services to get the workers from Quigslandia over to Quigstown. Problem is, the lessons I learned from building the first town (and it's now healty income) don't quite work for the poor fucks in Quiglandia. I run out of money. So now im going back and forth between the two cities, trying to consolidate public services, and generally having a blast.
On top of which, the jillion graphical overlays that you can slap up are just great. It's neat seeing where the clogs are in your systems.
I like the way the economy works too. Right now I'm running a microprocessor plant. I need plastics and alloys to produce computer chips, except I can't quite figure out how to import those materials, and even if I did, my transportation system has gone to shit and isn't really effective.
SO. I turn to recycling. I get all my citizens to recycle, then cart off the alloys and plastics they've thrown away and turn them into computers and televisions. Yay!
I saw the option to build an airport by the way. Took up too large a space to want to use, but it was there. Arcologies can be built too, but it looks like it's more a regional thing then an in-city option. I'd be more dissapointed if I didn't enjoy the regional map as much as I do. It makes sense the arcology would be it's own entity anyway.