If only it was this easy in real life! It's beautiful and full of atmosphere, but leaves a lot to be desired.
The games starts you off with letting you pick either the Sandbox mode or the Build New York mode.
The sandbox gives you the entire island of Manhattan, to do what you want with - with the exceptions of the loved landmarks and parks.
It's up to you if you want competition or just play around forever in your pace. This is a nice feature but does get a bit boring in the end. Especially the ristrictions with what buildings can be in what areas is annoying, and quikly made me stop playing that mode.
The other part is the main game "Build New York". It starts you off in a small area and guides you just enough to get started. The games works by You chosing a buisness, a home or an office building and puts it in an empty area on the map. You do not decide how the buildings look - and the amount of different buildings are very limited. But you can give the buildings personality by customising it with differnt signs and upgrades.
This works fine at first, but when you have to do it to the 1000s of different buildings it quikly get's to be a boring chore.
The computer doesn't really compete with you at any time. What it does is it fills up the empty areas along with you. If you build a shop it builds a house, if you build a house it builds a shop. It never tries to compete with you, only help. This makes it's almost imposible to fail, and does leave a lot to be disired. Especially when you have the sandbox mode, incase you just want to relax.
What it all comes down to is a very easy and at times a bit boring game.
This is no way a Sim City killer, not even close. But it does give you the opotunity to create New York City the way you like - as long as you like it with a very limited amount of different buildings.
Basicy it not a bad game at all, it's visually beautiful, when you zoom in to streetlevel it really feels like New York. And the different areas does have the different personalities we love or hate.
It is fun to play Donald Trump. What drags it down is the very limited amount of options, and the very easy gameplay.
Personly I like it a lot, but I would strongly surgest playing the demo before buying it.