An excellent game that will have you coming back and playing it over and over again.
First off you start by zoning a small area of land and giving it the necessities: power, education, hospitals. If you know what you're doing the city will explode in growth and in a matter of days playing time will take up nearly your entire game area. This is where it gets fun. As you build more police stations, fire stations, airports etc, you get more U-Drive-It missions. Most of them are quite easy and you'll finish them with minutes left on the clock, although dodging traffic in your custom-built city can sometimes be a challenge. One of the High points of the UDI missions is choosing to support the bad guys or your own citizens. If you help the bad guys you get heaps of money but your mayor rating takes a bad hit. If you help your citizens you most likely won't get money but your rating will go up.
Fine tuning every aspect of your city will take up most of your time. You must regulate taxes with zoning demands, build hospitals, schools, and other buildings where they are needed, and make sure everyone in your city is content. This might sound like more work than play, but there is so much to do that you'll rarely get bored. In the event that you do, you simply speed up the game and in a couple minutes there will be loads of things to do again. It can get a bit hairy later on, when things such as residents leaving due to no jobs while commercial and industrial buildings close simultaneously due to no demands, but with a little skill the difficulties can be solved.
The graphics of this game are pretty good. At the third closest zoom your city looks sharp and finely detailed, every individual person and vehicle is shown on the streets, sidewalks, and by the buildings. Zoomed in very close isn't very spectacular, you'll find the buildings to be blocky and poorly rendered, but it is easily excusable. It also runs decently on even somewhat old machines, although it takes a couple minutes before your computer will be ready to smoothly let you maneuver around.
The sound is also quite good. You'll hear a variety of songs, with two separate soundtracks for Regional/god mode, and mayor mode. You hear tires squealing, motors running, strikers, chanting, and any other sounds you normally hear in a city.
With the wide variety of god mode and mayor mode options, decent U-Drive-It missions, and the ability to drop your Sims 1 characters into your city where you choose, this is a game any Sims fan or strategy fan needs to get.