This game is a mess, surely even the most diehard fans can agree. It looks messy, it plays messy, the UI is messy, the gameplay is messy, the art style is messy. It's just a mess.

Like, I got the After Dark expansion (it's the only one I got, and I'm glad I didn't pay for any others after messing with it) and it includes sliders for day/night usage of utilities, right? But at night time, utility usage is pretty much the same as daytime, because they didn't bother to make night/day...different. People are still at school so I can't reduce the school budget. People are still using just as much power and water, so I can't reduce those or people complain. If I move the camera over to a commercial area it sounds like it's the middle of the day on black friday even though it's midnight and there's no cars around. There's a solar power plant that is completely useless at night and can't be used by itself. It's a complete mess.

I want to play this game, even just casually to create pretty cities (It's certainly not good enough to be played seriously, a small child could excel at this game), but there's so many hoops to jump through and messes to clean up and sweep under the rug and tiptoe around, I don't know if I can do it.