I thought the first one was a pretty basic city builder with a cool theme, but pretty shallow mechanics. Every pop-up decision was basically correct and every consequence completely transparent, which made it very much a numbers game for me, and not a very hard one.
I played it once, and that was basically it. The map is tiny by design and you don't have much freedom in building your city, unless you want to do it suboptimally, so the replay value was very low, which is a big failing in a city builder for me.
FP2 seems to have solved at least some of those issues, so it sounds good to me.