So, what's the deal then?

With the original SimCity concept pretty much binned, you may wonder "what's the point, then?" Well, there are these "Societal Values," a bunch of numbers affected by what buildings you add to your city: Productivity, Prosperity, Creativity, Spirituality, Authority and Knowledge. Each Home, Workplace, Decoration and Venue affects one or more of these Values, and if the Value goes negative, the latest building asking to "consume" that Value cannot operate until you somehow increase it back to positive with additional buildings. Your citizens live in buildings you can find under "Homes", they work (and generate revenue for you) in "Workplaces", and they spend their free time visiting different kind of "Venues" - keeping commutes between each type short is a good idea.

Liquor Store - providing Productivity and Happiness for everyone.

Civil Defense Tower - keeping an eye on the population.

Infrastructure, beyond power plants and roads, is found under Workplaces, and yes, that means even the police station and fire station generates funds for you. Nice happy-fairy land it is, but I guess it's the side-effect of the silly "no expenses" financial model of the game. So in essence, you check the Values of your city, then plop down buildings based on what you need or can spend, mixing Homes, Workplaces and Venues somewhat evenly around the place, and that's it. That's the whole "game".

Sure, there are small special things, such as specialist Sims, Sim happiness levels and all the interactions how certain buildings affect things (such as revenue of nearby buildings), but when you boil it all down to the basic framework, there isn't a game here. It's all just a glorified dollhouse where you have to ensure these "Values" all stay positive. If you want, you can even switch to Free Play, which is the official toy set mode - all buildings are unlocked, and there are is no money or any Values limiting you.

Different cities

Lots of work seems to have gone towards providing numerous different "tilesets" - you can build corporate business cities, agricultural cities, authoritarian concrete hells, futuristic cyberpunk-style cities and many others - or you can mix buildings from all the different sets. While it offers some additional entertainment, giving a reason to start over with a different style and look, it doesn't really change things much, as far as the gameplay is concerned. You still build stuff to keep your population happy and the money flowing in. Authoritarian cities might build Secret Police HQs while Corporate one builds Consulting Firms. Different city types reach their goal of keeping the population productive in different ways, but the bottom line is that no matter the city type you pick, all you really do is put down different buildings to boost revenue, population and values.

There is a massive selection of different building types across different city types at your disposal.

This looks a bit out of place in my Soviet-style Worker's Paradise...

CO₂ = bad; magic H₂ = good

Hydrogen plant - zero CO2 emissions. Not sure where they pull the hydrogen from...

I'm not sure if EA received money for it, but SimCity Societies is also "associated" with BP, who "Strongly supports the use of low carbon energy sources - in the virtual world and the real one" (quoted straight off the manual booklet). In practice this means that different power plants have carbon dioxide ratings, and if you go nuts with coal and oil plants, you end up with smog and unhappy Sims complaining about global warming. It's nice that games get environmentally active, but in SimCity Societies, the practical effect is that you get to choose between the polluting fossil fuel plants, or environmentally sound choices like wind power and the magical "hydrogen plant", which apparently generates it's hydrogen from nothing [no no no no NO! Stupid SimCity! - angry ex-physics teacher Ed].

Low carbon dioxide plants are considerably more expensive to build when compared to the traditional choices, but as there are no maintenance or fuel costs for anything in the game, (and the money keeps on flowing in as long as you can keep your finger off the build buttons for a few minutes), there is no real reason not to drop in these magical hydrogen plants, and forget about the whole thing. If it only would work like that also in real life... Granted, they are not available in every tileset, so if you want to keep your city true to the style you have chosen, you may have to choose a less perfect option - but nothing in the game prevents you from dipping to the other tilesets for individual buildings.