This is a pretty awesome review, nice one.
The last SimCity game that I enjoyed was SimCity 3000, 4 had too many bugs and on release 2013 was pretty much the same. It's good to see that they've ironed out the issues. To be totally honest, I forgot about this game until reading your review. I do remember when it came out, a lot of my ex co-workers brought the game, and on day one were duly disappointing, the negative reviews from them all made me avoid and and frankly I totally forgot of the games existence until I read your review!
I honestly didn't think I'd ever play the game either after hearing so much negativity surrounding its launch. I'm very glad I found it at the thrift store, because it's been a lot of fun. I even got my wife to play the game and enjoy it, and she's never played PC games at all. We may end up trying multiplayer together, so I'll be sure to post about how that goes.
I actually haven't played any of the older SimCity games, so I'll have to pick one of those up at some point, too, so that I can compare the gameplay.
Definitely worth giving it a shot now! Thanks so much for reading the review!