I can understand fire and policing, but hmm, entertainment? That is your responsibility too. A very annoying aspect with Cities XL is that you have to micromanage everything in order to make people's lives better. You can add mods and new maps but terraforming options are rather limited even with the former. There are some options for resource trading that may make some players happy but personally not a big fan of them as they are unrealistic.

However plenty of empty spaces unless you do a perfect grid pattern.

The ability of doing curved roads is a big plus. Plenty of road options though no freeway options. The ability of doing Decent graphics and simulation.