One of the best city builders of all time. If you want spend lots of hours on front of your PC this is the game you need
Sim city 4 is addictive, very fun to play and at the same time a very hard and satisfactory game in the PC. For the veterans in the franchise this is a good expansion of buildings, stats, and tools to build a beautiful or a disaster city.
One of the good things in the beginning of game is the Sim Nation with a lot of space with customizable terrain to begin your own project of city, this is very fun especially when you use your computer with another player (I know, nowadays share computers are not so frequent than 8 year ago, but trust me, is fun).
The growing of the cities are very dynamic, you can go for entire cities based on industry, commerce or gambling, all depends on your style of game and the decisions to grow up your city.
In other way I found some issues with the construction of highways and railroads, in the first times get frustrated because the tutorial don't explains some things about construction in populated areas, in other words, some tools are try and error to learn how to use them correctly.