Let's start with the good things...

The graphics are nice if your rig can handle them (mine defaulted to low for everything so it looked like sim city from yesteryear until I upped it all), I cranked up all the graphics to max just to see what it looked like and it looked pretty nice, even though my laptop can't handle it. I run it at medium for the most part now, and it looks good enough.

The city specialization is nice, make a mining town or Las Vegas... but it's very limited in how long that will work, especially for mining, more of that later.

The MMO part where everyone can join a region is fun, make your city work with others in the world, something I'm sure most of us wanted... but it was implemented so badly it's not really worth it.

So the good things have a lot of bad attached to them. Let's move on to the bad then.

You MUST have a permanent internet connection or you can't even play, there is NO offline mode at all... WoW anyone? Due to the need of the internet connection it's SLOW, as everything has to be d/l or u/l from the cloud (best to let your city run for a few game hours before you quit or it might not save everything you did so sucks if you crash and EA and crashing...)

SimCity used to be a long term game, it's not anymore. I'll explain.

So it's great that we can make mining cities and stuff now and that resources aren't endless, but the resources barely last long enough for you to make a city reliant on those resources, after selling off nearly all your resources to upgrade your HQ it seems kinda pointless when you can't keep that up. I've never seen a mine in RL close after two years because it ran out of resources and yet in SimCity this is exactly what happens, you have to respecialize your city, after spending a lot of time and money to make a great mining town you're basically kicked in the privates and told to make a new city.

Again on resources, water...

Water runs out, fast.

So like in RL our cities are relying on water and power and even garbage from outside of the city... but... there is nothing outside the city other than what other people make. It's been mentioned a lot about the small size of city land now, you really don't have room for power plants and land fill, now we need a bunch of water pumping stations that all run out? With less land to put them on? Bad form EAxis.

I guess the Sim City of old is dead, the new Sim City is for people with no attention span that don't want to spend weeks or even months on their city to make it great. This five minute city is not appreciated to this reviewer. I don't want to make a new city, I want the one I made to be long term. After all wasn't that the point of it in the first place?

Sim City... make a city that grows and is profitable... lucky to get a full day play out of a city now. Your resources run out way to damn fast. For example, you go with mining, plop a mining HQ and have to sell of nearly all your resources just to upgrade your HQ... then have nothing left to sell or smelter... not very long term.

I know this review is long winded, but I hope some people read it and get something useful out of it. Some of us have waited a long time for this game, and it was a total disappointment.

New players have fun, for the old players, not worth it.