Should be renamed Simcities for Dummies
Don't get me wrong. Societies is probably the most visually pleasing of the SimCity games. The building designs are pretty, but pretty only works in beauty contests, and this game has very little else going for it. It's like the perfect prom date, good-looking and easy. A bit too easy, in fact.
Building cities is easy. Learning to play is easy. Everything about the game is, well, easy. The challenges that kept me playing SimCity 2000 et.al., are nonexistent, and the charming building graphics cannot make up for that lack.
Going back to the prom date analogy, pretty and easy get old eventually, and it's nice to have some substance to base the relationship on, even if the relationship is with a game.
Another problem with the game is how slowly it moves. I don't mean game-speed itself, but rather that performing tasks, moving the screen to different locales or moving/creating buildings and even bulldozing, is ponderously slow. I'm running an AMD 64 3600+ with a 1650 Graphics card and 2G of RAM, and still had difficulties moving around until I dropped the in game graphics down to their lowest settings, which rather defeats the purpose of having such "pretty" game graphics in the first place.
The learning curve for the game is about 5 seconds. The enjoyment curve is only slightly longer. If you want to blow $30 on a great game, go elsewhere. If you want an excellent city building game, go for one of the older versions of SimCities. If you really want to play this mis-incarnation of SimCities, wait until it hits the bargain bin. At $29.99, it just doesn't have the bang for the buck, and judging by its playability, it'll be in the bargain bin soon.