Welcome to Sim Banana Republic, Senor Presidente.
Tropico is Pop Top's simulation of a mythical Third World nation circa the Cold War, with an emphasis on building construction, resource management, and politics. It's a fun little game with clear, crisp graphics and a multitude of options for a player to explore.
Startup
Tropico starts off with quick and painless tutorial to show you where all the screen buttons are and give you some hints at what strategies to follow. Once you get through that, you can start the real game, which introduces you as the newly elected/installed/winner of the bloodbath Presidente de La Republica de Tropico. Difficulty of the game is set by choosing the island size, starting population, amount of mineral resources, rainfall, basic terrain, length of game, and a series of restrictions on your rule ranging from UN monitored elections to a population that starts revolution at the drop of a hat. The number options seems daunting, but they're presented in clear, well designed menus that make choosing easy. After that, you get a touch of role-playing by choosing your ruler's style from a portfolio based on real-life former dictators. You choose how your dictator rose to power, two positive attributes, and two flaws, all of which affect the starting opinion of the local political factions towards you. After choosing all that, it's on to the game!
Game-play
Tropico is a building game at it's heart, so at the beginning you start with $10,000, a spiffy looking Presidential Palace, a Dock, headquarters buildings for the local Teamsters and Laborers, four farms, and many, many tin-shack hovels where your population lives. Your first priority should be switching at least one farm to a cash crop, and building a mine or a logging camp to start s/t/r/i/p/p/i/n/g r/e/s/o/u/r/c/e/s providing your republic with much needed cash. From there it's a juggling act between satisfying the masses' need for housing & education, with your need to maintain power long enough to build up your Swiss bank account. There are number political factions to satisfy, from the local Communists, the Capitalists, the Church, the Militarists, etc., anyone of which might spark a popular revolution against you if they think you're slighting them. It sounds hard, but it boils down providing needed bread and circuses, and trying to keep the wage disparities from becoming too glaring.
Play is real time, with an interruption at the beginning of the year to provide with an evaluation portfolio providing the usual stats on the economy, population happiness, and your game score. Every five years you must decide whether to hold an election (and whether to rig it). If you're voted out of office you're sent into exile in a rowboat, which beats being shot I suppose. Like any good dictatorship, you can skim money off the top of deals with bogus fees, and jail or eliminate your political opponents (with the subsequent risk of political unrest). As a nod to Yanqui sensibilities you cannot enter the lucrative recreational pharmaceutical market, though you can make a good living off of Cuban cigars and rum if you want to satisfy your need for unhealthy behavior.
Your citizens are represented by individual characters, each with his own portfolio of needs and wants, and information concerning their family, education level, and political leanings. You can't order them about individually, but your policies will effect where they choose to go and what they do.
Look and Feel
Tropico is a lovingly constructed game. You can zoom out to view the entire island, or pop down for a close up of individual buildings and citizens. All of them are rendered three-dimensionally, and their images were extremely sharp on my Pentium 3's monitor. Game-play is handled entirely onscreen, with menus instead of keyboard commands. The voice actor that does the advisor's announcements appears to be a native Spanish speaker, so the accent is believable instead of grating. Of especial note is they background music, which is nice mixture of jazzy Latin instrumental beats that manage not to be neither overly repetitive nor distracting from game-play. And for once the game plays well straight out of the box, instead of requiring a patch to download and install before the game is ever booted up. NOTE: There is a patch available, but it appears just to tweak game-play a bit. As far as I've been able to determine, Tropico has no fatal bugs.
Nitpicks
There really isn't anything wrong about Tropico to report. I do wish the game did give you the option to give your Presidente and your nation a name of your own choosing. Otherwise you're stuck with the name of a real-world dictator ruling the Republica de Tropico. Personally I've always been fond of La Republica de Los Bananas myself.
Recommendation
Tropico is a well-made, addictive game. If you like building construction type of games, and are looking for one in an unusual setting, Tropico is well worth your time.
