Tropico Review

There are principally eight essential macro-areas, which you need to take care of in the game: politics (elections, issuing edicts, and assassinating political rivals if necessary), the economy in general (agriculture, industry, tourism), education (high schools, colleges), religion, health, military, entertainment, and infrastructure (roads, housing, electricity, ecology). It's up to you to determine your priorities in order to realize maximum results as long as you manage to win an election every five or so years, or fend off the attacks of the disloyal army officers. As you can see, we're getting right back to my opening sentence here.

Tropico introduces a lot of familiar city building concepts, but it also adds a new dimension with its political twist. Being a good ruler doesn't solely imply that you know how to manage a country to prosperity. Leading a whole bunch of wacky "banana republic" citizens can be a handful. The population is divided into different classes: militarists, communists, capitalists, environmentalists, and intellectuals, and each of these classes deserves special attention, which is reflected in the way you favor or neglect the aforementioned country's macro-areas of interest.

All of these elaborate concepts shouldn't scare you off however, as they work like a charm in the game. PopTop obviously has a lot of experience in this particular genre, and it shows. The micro-management aspect of the game is cleverly done, meaning there's no need to literally baby-sit each and every citizen (phew, thank God for that). Tropico gives you a chance to build like something over 80 buildings if I read correctly, and then there is always the business of bribing people and locking them up. Also, you get to run your country's foreign politics by making alliances with superpowers like Russia or the US.

Initially, you'll get hooked. The graphics are detailed and appealing (both the people and the environments), there is plenty of stuff to build, and the soundtrack is excellent (the Latino tunes are really, really relaxing - I wish there were more of them). However, as you stay with it for a while, you'll realize that apart from the basic and rather short 50 year goal, Tropico has very little to offer in terms of a clever and appealing scenario. The deceptively short 50 years in which you get to achieve your goals is due to the mishandling of the game speed option. Most of the time I had to keep the game running on "very fast", cause I'm such an impatient bastard, and it takes like forever for my damn Tropicans to build an airport. Unfortunately, playing the game on such high speed usually makes you neglect certain duties like balancing out the wages, or taking care of people's medical needs. I guess one could say Tropico is not a game for the impatient, and one might be right, but it ain't like most of the people that are likely to buy Tropico are hardcore Fidel Castro wannabes. As it is, you're bound to play the game on fast-forward, because many structures take a long time to build. And considering that most of your dictator-duty in Tropico revolves around building various types of structures this design glitch is bound to offset Tropico's gameplay dynamics.

And don't forget; although the game is fun while it lasts (with plenty of stuff to build and plenty of macro-areas to manage), the pre-defined scenarios do not offer any qualitative innovations. They're just harder, and with different starting configuration. That simply wasn't enough of an incentive for me to play the game for more than a few days. The starting story is rather mundane and it doesn't immerse the gamer enough, nor does it present the player with any kind of unfolding plot. You can continue to play as El Presidente after the preset 50 years, but the question remains: what is there for me to do after I've built almost every building in the game, and I'm making a ton of money (stashing some to my private Swiss account)?