When you're looking at a crime-ridden section of your city, you hear cars being broken into, alarms going off and gunshots. In country areas birds chirp happily. Throughout the town SimCitizens walk the streets and fire trucks make their rounds. Zoomed way out, the sounds change to upper wind noises, and rain clouds can be seen passing by. But with all this detail come the same inconsistencies inherent in any simulator.
Some details are overly strict while others are mere bylines.
Powerlines don't have to connect every zone anymore, flowing now through the developed zones. But the power grid graph has absolutely no reflection on how much power is available from your plants. To make this worse, when you have a neighbor deal to sell them power and your power runs out, there are no warnings that power is getting low. The deal is just suddenly voided, you're out the penalty of several thousand dollars, and you instantly have an incredible hole in your budget coupled with unusable surplus of power. There are new landscaping tools that are both better and worse.