About right...
When you start out, you'll notice you're in a region. Regions are places where you can build your SimCity cities and you can create a new region any time.
When building a city, you start off with $100,000 which is apparently 'limited', I don't think it is but anyhow. You start to lay out the roads and homes and stuff and also the taxes, but you have much more control over that then in previous SimCity games.
Notably, there are no missions in this game. Unlike SimCity and SimCity 2000 which had many.
You can build landmarks in this game, at a high cost but you can take out loans to buy them.
This game is a great recommendation, anybody could have dozens of hours of fun with it creating endless cities. Yet, another success from Maxis.