It's a resource management game and a city builder. You can set the level of detail on what you have to set up, but you can set up every single aspect of your economy and city. You build a farm and then must build tractors and combines and trucks to service the farm. You build a food factory to turn produce into food. You build trucks to deliver produce to the factory and food from the factory to the grocery store. The grocery store needs workers, it all needs workers. So you need housing. You need to build busses to get workers from the housing to the factory (they walk if it's close enough). You need fertilizer for your fields or they won't be nutritious. So you can build a fertilizer factory. Then you need all the stuff to support that. You need power and metal and wood and bricks, so you have to build all that.

You can also import goods from the broader Soviet Union or from the West. It's like if Cybersyn was a SimCity game.