Tropico

Rating:
Summary: Creative, intelligent, and most of all FUN
Review: This game can really be summed up in one word: FUN. Because of what others have said about this being a shallow game, I think this deserves a real explanation. I played the game for the first couple of hours, and it kept me really interested, even kept me up past midnight the first night of playing the game. I was a little disappointed at the time, and thought I had perhaps spent too much on such a shallow game. I went back at it later the next evening, and was just taken immediately by the breadth and immersion that the game provides. I really felt "attached" to my island and its people as well as its ultimate development and pursuit of a capitalistic society. Tropico will provide you with hours upon hours of wonderful entertainment ... just give it time to grow on you!

Rating:
Summary: Well the intro is pretty funny
Review: Certainly the packaging is cute with the comic book Castro, complete with cheeky grin, squeezing a couple of beach babes. And the intro will have you smiling to, but there aren't too many other humour injections after that.

The gameplay itself is pretty well thought out, though the implications of chosing to play a Commie or a Yank are pretty arbitrary, and there are a fair few elements which are straight-forward repetitive (eg If you get asked whether you want an election and decline you get the same response from your advisor every time).

Overall, the potential is great but if the diferentiator between this game & other SIMs is meant to be the humour & the exercising of crazy South American politics, then it doesn't really achieve it's goal. Slightly disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing But Not a Waste of Money
Review: Like most everyone else who has written a review, I was waiting anxiously for Tropico to be released. Railroad Tycoon II remains one of my favorite games & I thought it would be fascinating to see how the engine was transferred to a simulation such as this one. After having played the game quite a bit since it came out, my own verdict would be that it is an interesting attempt & there is some fun to be had, but that it does not measure up to what it could have been.

The origins of Tropico in the RRII engine are apparent: from the almanac that smacks down on your desktop at the end of each year to the little window on the bottom right that you can use to track individual people. The engine works just as well & is just as stable as it was in RRII. While it may be outmoded to some people, I like it & it serves to give Tropico a dose of familiarity.

My real problem with the game is twofold. First, as others have stated, the manual is not very helpful at all. This is a chronic problem in computer games but it is most hurtful in a game such as this in which obscure things sometimes happen for obscure reasons. In some of the games I played, I had a lot of trouble with my quality of life (pollution) rating. Checking the manual, I found that locating factories upwind of residences causes an increase in pollution & a decrease in quality of life. While in this case, the answer to the problem was in the documentation, in many many cases it isn't & it would take more gameplay than I'm willing to devote to anything to dredge it out.

My other problem was the difficulty in getting useful information out of the almanac & other "information" features. Trying to figure out whom to bribe or arrest can involve click after click--& if you want to bribe several members of a faction, you'll have to go through the routine each time. There does not seem to be anything equivalent to the screens in Caesar III or Pharaoh to let you figure out what's going wrong or going right.

On a couple of complaints others have had: my computer is a PII 350 & I have had very few problems running this game at all. My only difficulty has been rotating the map at high zoom which goes very slowly. The game can also get a little jumpy later in scenarios when a lot is going on. But I would say the ability of the game to run on my 2+ year old computer is a selling point.

And on building airports, I have built them in as little as 5 or 6 years or less. The most important thing to doing so is finding a *flat* piece of ground on which to place it. If you don't, the construction guys will spend years levelling off the area before construction can even begin. On some islands, you may not be able to build an airport at all since there may not be a suitable place for it. Also, make sure there are plenty of construction guys--you can never go wrong putting up another one of those construction buildings if building on your island seems to lag. And in any event, you can win the game without an airport.

In short, Tropico is worth a spin on your CD drive but it most likely won't last as long on my hard drive as Railroad Tycoon II or Caesar III have.

Rating:
Summary: Fun city-builder, NOTHING LIKE SimCity!!
Review: I see a lot of reviews here from people who expected another SimCity. This game is a lot closer to the Caesar series or Pharoah, or Majesty without the monsters. Your main challenge is keeping all your little island's different factions happy while maintaining a decent economy. This takes a lot of planning - new buildings take a long time to build, especially on a mountainous island, or if you try to branch out too much. One thing I found extremely difficult was judging the slope of the mountains - if you build on too steep an incline, the building times can triple, while your people begin to complain that they needed housing years ago. It can also be frustratingly hard to keep track of key people in the game, which is something you really need sometimes.

On the plus side, the graphics are stunning for a "non-accelerated" game, and the music is some of the best I've heard on a PC - it really reminds me of "the Buena Vista Social Club". The people of Tropico also have a surprisingly wide variety of personality traits. They aren't just little icons running around the map - they have extended families, and political motivations, and varying degrees of skill. The fact that you are required to take 2 character flaws for your avatar also contributes to the "personality" of the game, as the different flaws can really change the way the different factions respond to you.

One other thing really makes Tropico stand out in the crowd - NO BUGS! It's so nice to finally buy a game that doesn't require a patch the first time you play it, and never crashes or freezes. Too many developers these days release their games long before all the bugs are fixed, counting on the first buyers to work as a beta testing group and frustrating everybody. Tropico worked like a charm. You will, however, need a computer with a decent processor speed to handle the graphics, especially when you rotate the screen a lot.

Rating:
Summary: Dictatorship 101
Review: Tropico is a game about politics. Though the game may appear to be about buildings and resource management, at its core is a very sophisticated AI that has its voter registration card and isn't afraid to use it.

From the very beginning, you are constantly faced with the age-old political challenge, being all things to all the people all the time. Six political factions, each with their own (often mutually exclusive) goals, are persistently pushing and prodding you for satisfaction, and sometimes they can push very hard. Managing the games dynamic political landscape is what this game is all about. Using all of the methods available to you, like buildings, decrees, bribery, religion, and rigged elections; you are eternally struggling to stay ahead of the next protest or uprising. The amazing detail that goes into each one of (unfortunately only) 500 citizens makes the game a true test of your management and social engineering skills. Because each citizen's opinion can influence the attitude and opinions of those around them, the game is constantly changing. That means that unlike most other strategy games where you hit a point at which the game becomes predicable and boring, in Tropico you always have a new challenge to keep the game interesting.

I highly recommend that you play the tutorial that the game offers, because the amount of information offered by the game can be overwhelming at first. Once you have an understanding of how the interface works, and how the information presented to you relates to what actions you have taken, you will be able to fully enjoy Tropico. The game menus are a little hard to work with, but after a little practice, and a patch (v1.2) that gives you some very useful hotkeys, the interface works amazingly well. My only major complaint about the game is the inability to rotate the buildings. Not being able to rotate the buildings can often lead to wasted space or awkwardly laid out villages. Another minor flaw is that the population of the game is limited to 500, although this does limit your ability to build a truly massive nation, it doesn't really detract from the game play.

If you are looking for a strategy game that is about more that killing, Tropico is for you. Although, if killing is your thing, there is always the assassination edict.

Rating:
Summary: Addictive... fun... a few problems....
Review: I have had a great deal of fun with Tropico in the last week, playing almost every night. The premise is interesting, and appeals strongly to the power-mad. I *like* being in charge! Others have said much about how the gameplay goes, so I will not address that in this review.

With near-infinite replayability (try different parameters on your island, or different characteristics for your avatar), this one will likely stay on my hard-disk for quite some time.

There are a few worms in the apple. The documentation that comes with the game is poorly written and poorly edited. The strategy guide from Prima isn't much better. Still, they suffice to get you started - I went through the tutorial and then struck out on my own, using the manuals as a reference. This worked pretty well, but I've still got some unanswered questions about gameplay.

I have a PIII-500 with 128 Meg of RAM and a 16-Meg video card. On this system, the graphics looked excellent, but were slow and jerky much of the time. Turning down most of the hi-end graphics allowed to game to speed up, but at a definite cost in quality. The graphics engine is the one used in RRTII, and it shows its age.

The music (a sort-of latinesque) fits with the play of the game, and doesn't distract. The voice-overs are fairly well done, but can be annoying if things aren't going well.

This is not a game for impatient people who want to do everything at once. It requires planning and forethought. It's a good game, with some interesting lessons in politics and economics.

Rating:
Summary: Long live El Presidente!
Review: You ever wonder what it would be like to be Fiedel Castro. Well if you do you must get this game. It is a great sim game and has many features and things to build. You can have tourists, run farms, make cigars, grow tobacco, and much more. You can execute people and even put them in jail. There are elections and if you make the people happy you will prevail. This game can get addicting so be careful. The graphics aren't what you would call magnificent, but most sim games don't have the best graphics. If you purchase this game you will not regret it and you will spend hours being the leader of the people. Long live El Presidente!

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I was one of many people who could hardly wait for this game to come out. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed in Tropico. The graphics are wonderful and there are some interesting pieces to this game; however, the game just did not keep my attention.

I found a great deal of the game play to be tedious and just not interesting. Part of the problem may be the poorly written manual. The manual really doesn't provide you with good information so you understand cause and effect relationships. In addition, certain things, like the airport, take an incredibly long time to be built even though I had apartments and a construction office nearby.

Finally, the political side of the game was much more simplistic than I expected. The politics seemed to be less complex than the political game play in Civilization.

I am a fan of the Sims games. If you don't like the Sims type games, I doubt this one will be a good pick for you. If you do like them, you may enjoy Tropico. As I said before, the graphics are great and there are pieces of the game that are enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Game
Review: Its very original, I like it very much. You should play it if you are a fan of any SimCity or Simulator. The creators demonstrate they have enough imagination to cover each detalied aspect of the game. Check some reviews for more in depth information.

Rating:
Summary: Poor timing and herky jerky graphics destroy good concept
Review: Sounds Kewl does it not, rule your own island ala Fidel, Baby Doc etc??? Unfortunately this game is just like any other sim game in that after you play it once or twice it gets pretty BORING.

I have to agree this game should not be purchased if you have a slow computer. Even if you have a fast or medium speed computer it still runs herky jerky. The game's timing stinks. In one game it took me 50 years to build an airport. YAWN its 2006 people here is your airport.

Then there is the stupid political side of the game, no Grenada scenario here folks...throw the US a bone and they leave you alone, my experience was the Soviets could care less. But do I really expect them to do anything in 1998, 2003 or 2008?

Then there is all the left wing economic [stuff], NOW WONDER COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM FAILED. How can you manage an economy with no free market??

I like the concept. The execution failed miserably and unless you are a SIM nut I would avoid this game.