Ugh... the pixel fest.. I swear... people make use "retro" when they really just want to be "lazy"....
I was debating the Sim City complete over on GMG... that's like 13 bucks... with a 22% off coupon.. that ain't too terrible... but it's EA... blech.
In its defense
It aint simcity4/3/2000/etc, your not going to be building massive cities and the small size will feel constraining. However if you have some friends to play with it is an interesting variation on the simcity gameplay. Me and a couple friends going in to a region and working together to get some big projects done is fairly fun, as well as generating enough stuff to keep everyone happy and focusing certain cities on certain things. For 10$ it aint bad
The cities of tomorrow dlc is sort of interesting, brings in a ton of new stuff. The only problem with it is once you have it you really feel as if you almost have no incentive to work towards anything else but the DLC stuff, so it sort of narrows the focus of the game. Of course it has been a few months since I played so maybe it was just me focusing on it.
Also there is a mod out there that unlocks the full city region size. Normally when you claim a region you are locked into a small area that can be considered 'the city'. The mod expands the city borders to the full region size allowing you to build a ton more as well as expand the built in transportation, it gives you 'regional' highways/trains/etc to expand them. However when using the mod you cannot play those online, so you have to get a mod manager to switch it on and off. There are some quirks, like trees cant be removed since they arent really there, just part of the graphics of the region, and creating some super fancy transportation like maglevs across that region wont work. Anyways it can quadruple the buildable size:
http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/29650-project-orion-3k-extended-boundary/
Its really too bad, for me the only truly bad part of it was city size, if it wasnt for that part I would really love the game. They also removed the ability to start out creating a focused city, i.e. industry only so you can just have a mining town, they used to let you but now at a certain point you hit a failure condition unless you strike a balance which gets annoying since you gotta build up a city just to destroy 2/3 of it to focus it once its going
