Graphics may be a bit dated, but gameplay is unequalled in the tycoon genre.
Want to try your hand at being a farmer; a automobile tycoon; furniture mfg; oil company; toy industry etc. etc. and etc. There are nearly 100 different industries to choose from and a fully dynamic global and local economic engine that works on the simplicity of supply and demand, as well as a particular county of your city's taste.
In one city, one grocery store will have a high demand for fish and another will hate fish and have no demand. You set the prices for low demand products by putting them on sale to attract customers, but this is not where the fun begins.
The fun begins in setting up your transportation network, laying roads for trucks, rail for trains, as well as cargo ships, helicopters and airports, but make sure you don't go hog wild with all of these goodies or your transportation costs will be more than the products retail selling price and bankruptcy will be assured.
You not only have to transport raw materials to your factories to create finished goods, but you must transport your finished goods to your retail outlets where the money is actually made in the sale of your products. Every other cost is production and transportation, all of which are red ink.
You can also set the prices of your finished goods in your retail outlets to either increase or decrease demand, which can take a strain off of your production chain trying to keep up for high demand products which can cause gridlock at the trains station, truck depot and God forbid, the airports, where your airplanes will be either sitting on the runway costing you a fortune, or worse, circling the airport waiting for one of the grid locked planes to take off. of course planes do not have unlimited fuel and will eventually fall out of the sky costing you a pretty penny to replace.
It is a sad testament to the gaming industry reviewers who give this game such a low rating (calling it a spreadsheet with graphics) when nothing could be further from the truth. It is truly an extremely well written, entertaining and fun game with 1000% replay value, as their are so many different products you can bring to market, and you'll never play a game where you will even have 25% of all the different products available, being manufactured and transported - the brain has it's limits and even Donald Trump and Rockefeller could not micromanage a tenth of the industries in IG2 at the same time.
Bottom Line: If you like strategy games and tycoon games, this one is a must have. If you have a 6800 or better NVIDIA card you'll need a patch made by one of the JoWood community for it to work.
I could go on for another ten paragraphs of all the features, but I believe what I have written gives you an idea of the diverse fun-factor and replayability of this game.