After playing the game for over 12 hours now, I think I can safely say it is worth the (rather low) price!
This game is what Sim City wanted to be. It looks good, has powerful tools that allow the player to create very nice looking cities and offers a neat mix between city building and traffic management.
I love that basic water physics simulation. Districts are a great idea. The "Tchirp" thing is a hillarious way to implement twitterin a meaningful way in the game.
The engine works well and offers decent speed even for large cities. I had some odd problems that forced me to play in DX9 mode (screen turning black), but no crashes outside of that.
That being said, the game does cheat quite a bit to pull that amount of fidelity off. Reflections are just a static texture put on all the reflective surfaces, cars and people have no collission and vehicles will "respawn" at their starting location if there is a deadlock. Finally people only have to exist for workplaces to stay in business, they don't actually have to be able to reach it (goods, however, have to be moved to and from C and I areas!).
And if you are a hardcore simulationist, you probably won't like that they capped the number of active agents to 65k. The game still simulates more people, but they can't use pathfinding (and are thus stuck inside buildings until a simulation spot is free). I think that is an acceptable way to balance out simulation and performance, but I know some hardcore Sim City 4 guys may disagree.
It also isn't very challenging. Getting your start right is the biggest issue, after that you are usually stuck with a decent money surplus that keeps growing as your city expands. There are no natural disasters (apart from occassional fires), so the player has to screw up in order to cause a crisis (hint: do not build a dam next to your populated areas. The water WILL find some sneaky way out of the reservoir).
All in all, though, I'd say the game is a great example on how to pull off a good City Sim with limited money and manpower (9-13 man team!). If you like the Sim City series there is no reason to NOT to get the game.
Some screenshots from one of my cities:
And here a nice picture from reddit - a city that actually looks like a european town: