Although the game has many tech issues, you wil begin to ignore it when the game grows on you
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Destinations has added lots of gameplay that could enhance your cities you made before the expansion pack, and it has introduced new gameplay that can make even more societies.This expansion truly adds more strength to the "build the city of your dreams".There are now monuments, which you can have 3 in a city, and you have a whole list to pick from, from a rain forest to a Greek temple, whatever floats your boat.There are tons of ways to make your tourist town unique, from a tropical rain forest spiritual paradise, a mountain resort town with a ski lodge, a safari town, and you can mix anything together if you like to make very different societies, and the creativity this game allows you to express is what is soo good about it.
This game already includes patch 5, in case you never bothered to apply patches, they make a HUGE difference in the game. Like gamespot said, the patches include strategy mode which it adds a lot more focus to the game then just creative sandbox, which i think is what turned many off at the game's initial launch because it had no pull to keep the general audience in. What it does, in the difficulty of basic, hardcore, and nightmare, is for every building there is a set maintenance price on it (a daily fee to keep the building) some have high fees (usually government and transportation) some have low fees (like farms and smaller buildings). They all add up at the end of the day (midnight) and you are charged for them then, and if you can't afford it, some of your buildings will be dis-functional for X amount of hours depending on how much money you owed. Thus, this game now allows you to balance budgets!
if you don't like this new idea and want to sandbox play you can still do so with creative mode. The above is a free patch, but for those who quickly turned away from the game back in 2007 it may be important to you.
I originally been a devil for EA, but now i don't find them as greedy and stupid as i once thought (finding my graphic problems are more Microsoft's fault then EA/TM's, but Microsoft fixed their major issue in windows 7 i can play the game again). I would still say their QA (quality control) did a terrible job at getting the bugs out, but if you scroll through the tilted mill forum you will find there are little quick fixes for a bunch of them (like the floating building issues) that can quickly eliminate your frustration. The game still crashes on major major cities and fps can get ugly, but this game again wasn't designed to handle populations over 200k (may not seem a lot on paper, but in game its A LOT) if you keep these nice and tiddy, not cluttered and crammed together, your fps (regardless of your computer specs) and crashing should be ok.
This game if you allow yourself to enjoy it instead of instantly coming from SC4 and being told by other SC4 fans it sucks and you should hate it to and finding whatever you can to hate the game. The game will grow on you, trust me. It can be addictive to try to build your dream city, gaining tourism stars, positive feedback, happy sims, pollution and traffic (the game dumbed down car transportation much from previous sim city games, but roads still can get very busy and slow sims down, so in major cities logical placement of bus and subway stations can get sims quickly to work/venue/home.
and... don't forget to get mods!!!! This is very important, and will make the game grow on you. It extends the game to beyond limits, and they can be found both at SCS official site and Tilted Mill forum. And also most importantly, have fun!