This is the type of game that I love! Strategy-based, but does require some real-time intervention & is an ever-evolving combination of creation & puzzle-solving.



The potential drawbacks/cautions:

1. This will suck up a LOT of time. I installed the game on a rainy Saturday afternoon, started playing/building my first city, and eventually looked down at my phone to see what time it was and realized I'd been playing for about 6 hours straight. Seriously. It's immersive and time will fly by. This isn't the type of game you can jump onto for 20 minutes and then move on to other things.

2. This may drive you to spend money on a new PC/hardware. I thought I had a decent laptop. And it worked just fine for about 12 hours of cumulative gameplay. But now my first city has grown large enough that the graphics card is maxed out, and the CPU isn't far behind. Every element of the city can be clicked on and you'll see tons of detail that is being tracked by the game. Example: every car on the roads can be clicked on, and you'll see details of the specific driver, it's origin, destination, and route. With thousands (even tens of thousands) of individual "cars" driving around, that's a lot of processing power being used. About to buy my first desktop PC in 15+ years so I can have sufficient hardware (and ability to upgrade components) to handle this game.

3. Mods: the open-source nature of this game means there are hundreds/thousands of mods that can be obtained - some for a fee, most for free. Of course each additional mod requires more computing power, and there's the possibility that some mods won't play well with each other. So far I've only purchased the base game, but there are a few of the expansion packs that I'll probably end up buying.