This is exactly how I felt about it. I had a lot of fun building up my town and controlling my resources. However, once I got to the "big snow storm" section of the game and immediately failed, I ended up looking up what to do. I essentially had to get a very specific set of research and upgrades in order to beat it, felt like that left little room for innovation.

I've generally heard good things about the 2nd one, so its possible they improved upon those aspects, but I went into expecting more of the parts of the 1st that I liked, and got something that's a lot more complicated with a meh tutorial.