This is probably my all-time favourite game. Ever.

Seriously, this game was like, 50% of my childhood. Ignore my Steam playtime, I played thousands of hours of this back in the day.

So it may not be the only big-name city builder in town now that we have Cities: Skylines, but I think there's still some things that this game does better, ever nearly 20 years after its release. For example, you have whole regions rather than individual cities, although individual cities in this game are smaller than their C:S counterparts. (A medium SC4 tile is roughly equivalent to a C:S starting tile) I'd argue that this game, being technically 2D with an isometric view, allows for much more detailed and realistic buildings that you get in C:S, especially vanilla stuff.

What really makes this game great though is the same thing that makes its de facto successor great - the community. Over the years there has been some amazing custom content released for this game, and while there's no workshop support, there's plenty of guides out there for installing mods and custom buildings available from all the major fansites such as SC4Devotion and Simtropolis, among others.

Be aware that this is an old game, and it doesn't always play nicely with modern hardware. Like before there's guides to get this game running as well as it can on modern systems, but even with all that you will run into slowdown as your cities grow. A major limitation of this game is that it's single-threaded, so even the latest multi-core processors may not help much. This game will crash sometimes as well, so you'll need to save often.

There are tutorials in-game, but with these types of games I always think the best way to learn is by just playing. There's no shortage of tutorials out there for everything from basic city planning to interchange designs (using the Network Addon Mod) and more. This really is an all-time classic, honestly one of the last truly great games to come out of EA. Speaking of which, there's none of that Origin nonsense here, so consider that a plus.

Honestly I could talk forever about this game, but I'll finish it here. Just buy it. If you have even the slightest interest in city building or management games in general, you'll like this. Even at full price, you'll get more than your money's worth.