Tropico 4

For those who haven't played Tropico 3 or earlier versions, a short introduction:

This is a real time strategy/city building game that puts you in control of a small island in the carribean. You will have to make economical as well as political decisions and balance your island around the needs of your population. Everyone belongs to a political party, like the religious or the intellectuals, which have also needs and which can cause you a very hard time if ignored. The people have also personal needs, like entertainment, food, etc., so you will have to build strategically to accomodate them. Even more so if you want to prevent traffic jams by people who have to drive over half the island to satisfy their needs. The complexity level of Tropico is HUGE. Buildings have different modes they can run in, work slots that you can open or close, salaries, maintenance costs, and several more. Every individual in Tropico has its own personality and is actually simulated on your island in real time. You can stalk them, have them arrested, or shot if they become troublesome. If large parts of the population are incontent they will become rebels and launch attacks from the woods. You will have to either make them happy beforehand preventing that, or build a strong military and then kill them. You're pretty much free to rule any way you want. You can be a Military Dictator with an iron fist. You can be a big, deceptive liar who controls the people through propaganda. Or you can be as democratic as possible and just try to make the people as happy as possible. Income comes either from industry (that's where the REAL income is) or from tourism. You can build several hotels and attractions for the latter, and even many more buildings for your industries. You will also have to build appartments for the people, entertainment buildings like bars, and many more.

The game comes with a 20-Mission-Campain, and a Sandbox Mode, where you can create your own Island and play indefinitely. You can also create Challenges for yourself and other players, and put them online with the integrated Challenge-System. They're pretty much a single island each, with different tasks and goals, and where in the end the players' scores are compared to determine the ranking.

You can play pretty much from any perspective you want. Zoom in and out and rotate around the island like you want. You can zoom in so far that you can actually "walk through the streets" and enjoy your island from a single person's point of view.. which can be breathtaking after hours of building it pretty much from the clouds' point of view.

I would rate this game a 5/5, but because of the below mentioned changes and lack thereof (from Tropico 3), I cannot give it more than a 4.

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WHAT IS DIFFERENT (from Tropico 3)?

The graphics have changed - to the worse. It runs better now, but from real close the textures look blurry even on maximum settings. The water looks worse, and there is a whole range of things that don't look as good as Tropico 3. You can get around parts of it (if you own an NVIDIA card) by setting graphic settings in the NVIDIA control panel and overriding the game's. With a high end PC you will be somewhat disappointed. With a slower machine the game will run better for you than Tropico 3.

The whole gameplay is kind of task based now. You get a certain amount of tasks which you have to fulfill to start the next one. Most of them are without time limit and you're free to build at your leisure then. There are also many optional tasks that will give you varying benefits on fulfilling, like raising respect with a certain faction.

There are maybe a dozen new buildings with interesting functionalities. Take the Ministry for example, where you have to select or import Ministers for each edict category (like Foreign, Interior, ..). Without, you can use only general edicts. The ministers have three stats and depending on them you will occasionally get good (Foreign Minister gives a Rock concert and raises respect) or bad (Defense Minster gets mugged after giving long speech about safety) events. Theres a building that boosts surrounding farms, a nuclear power plant, and a few more that fit well into the game.

There is now a campain with a story that leads through the 20 missions which play on TEN islands - you will visit each island twice, but for different reasons and fulfill different tasks. One mission unlocks the next, until you're finished.

There are now more foreign nations. They will not invade, but they are important because they've all been assigned certain products to import or export. If you screw up the relationship with the Middle East for instance, you will have trouble with oil.

The whole import business. You can set up a Jewellry and import the gold to produce, for instance. You can also import food and other stuff.

The tourists seem to have a better behaviour with visiting attractions and less random driving around the city.

Also you can add air conditioners to the first two houses (tenement and appartments), increasing the living quality but using up electricity.

The islands are about 2-4 times bigger, and the population limit has also increased.

There are a few more traits for your president.

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WHAT IS THE SAME?

The basic gameplay is the same, with the above mentioned additions.

The buildings look exactly the same with only small changes, mostly color and the above mentioned blurriness.

The outfits the president can chose are EXACTLY the same as in Tropico 3. Not ONE new outfit has been added.

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CONCLUSION:

Tropico 4 has been optimized to run well on consoles. That is why the blurriness of the textures is there. And that is why many other things (like the water) look worse now. There are comparisions of screenshots between Tropico 3 and 4 even in the official Tropico Forum from Kalypso Media. But the thread has been locked in the meanwhile. My personal opinion is that you must be blind to not see the difference, especially from up close.

The game also adds little in changes that justifies the 4 after the name and I would say its not much more than an expansion, even if a good one at that.

That all sounds bad but Tropico is still one of my favourite strategy games and I must say that I've had a blast playing through it. I've been playing it since Tropico 1 and while I'm sad that the preferences have changed to consoles and we PC users have somehow become second class customers, I've still had a great time. I'm somewhat curious what the future brings however, and how much more the franchise is going to change to accomodate the console players.

The gameplay itself is better with the tasks, but its also easier. Gone are the moments where you realize after 4 hours of playing that you can't possibly complete the mission and have to restart.

There is however one issue with the last mission. The last task will inform you that the whole mission has been timed to end 2012, even if you're in 2019 by then. You then will fail a few seconds afterwards. It can however STILL be completed if you load an earlier save and construct the requested buildings befor the task comes up. You will then get an instant win!

If you haven't played Tropico before, Tropico 4 is a good place to start as any. I can obviously also recommend Tropico 3, even though you have to be careful with your decisions there (traits and during missions), or you will have to restart your Mission.

Tropico 4 bases you on a series of Tropical islands as a dictater, nice or not so nice. If you`ve played Tropico 3 you know the drill.

It`s still the same gameplay, you place farms, construction buildings , increase the population, etc, etc to increase cash for your people and yourself while dealing with anything that threatens your rule.

And there are many things that threaten your rule:

Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Oil slicks, rebels, volcanoes, superpowers, the VOTE, etc.

Interestingly you also now have to deal with China, the Middle east and Europe, all asking favour or doing you `favours` that may or may not help. Depending on your political stance some Superpowers can get pretty leary. For example, the US President has already several times threatened to either invade or launch missiles accidentally on purpose on my island. They haven`t done so yet, but if Tropico 3`s anything to go by, I suspect a US warship will appear off my coast soon... maybe I should make an alliance with the commies until I can build a nuclear capability? All this you can do.

There`s a lot of tongue in cheek too and I notice that the avatars of people that pop up actually represent their real life versions... there`s your President Nixon, Mrs. Thatcher, Yasser Arafat and that Chinese guy and others drawn in a caricature way, all wanting something. Everyone seems as crooked as you, except they`re democratic as opposed to being a straight forward dictator, like me!

The real changes are in the extra little things you can do like appoint Ministers (who can also cause embarrasment) or selecting export and import prices.

There`s a little more radio braodcast chatter about what you (there should be more) get to do and you still do great election speeches with polite applause, Stalin-style.

It`s actually very hard to fail in this game. As soon as things get difficult with the elections, just start several edits that will turn the people around, free food, a benefits system, lower taxes, etc, etc, before you know it your 30% vote turns into 90%. You can still blow it though as I did when I decided I didn`t like my Economics minsiter because she was going to vote against me. So I had her assasinated (yes you can do that). I watched her sitting on a park bench while my assassin walked up to her and shot her! Unfortunately, I must have done something wrong (like forgotten to have a covert force) because my election votes dropped dramatically, everyone seemed to know, and it was too late to turn it around- Fail.

Also you get rebellions... er, Gadaffi style and you must deal with them with your troops. Sometimes you can grant amnesty, but most of the time you have to kill them. Also I think certain superpowers aid towards revolt or is that my growing paranoia? Oh and you get attempted assasinations of your good self, although you don`t see anything dramatic- A graphic gunshot hole effect on screen or gunshot sound would`ve added to immersion and warned you of personal danger. In a creepy way there are many nods to reality in this game, even present day ones.

You can set up all kinds of draconian policies to cement your rule, but be aware of the consequences as you can really upset certain parts of your society from the Right wingers to the Left wingers. I like hovering between being really nice if they obey to slapping them in jail if they don`t- or worse, but keeping central in policy with compromise seems the best bet.

You can choose your character traits and look just like in Tropico3, but I was very disappointed to see there weren`t more custom options to how you look. How about even more hats, jackets, uniforms? How about the ability to custom colour your clothes? Hey, i`m El Presidente, I wanna look how I wanna look! UNIQUE! For a number 4 they could`ve added more stuff. A lot more. However, now your traits have levels they can go up by. So hopefully, I`ll be an educated, communist womaniser of level 5 soon!

Hey, Tropico makers, how about letting our avatar get married to whatever woman (or man if you`re a woman player) he feels like and have affairs too? Obviously with possible consequences. The little priveleges that dictaters can choose?

There`s a sandbox mode which I was expecting to play first, but I got quite into the mission Campaign modes. However, I know sandbox will be my favourite mode as I like the realistic freedom of it and setting the options.

Ok, Sounds. Sounds are very good as usual- You hear everything if you zoom close enough. The Music is excellent, with some new tracks, and really helps keep you jolly even in the depressing moments.

Graphics are improved and animations appear better. Everything looks very good in a sunny sort of way- maybe a tad too colourful? I really like how you can zoom right down to street level and literally see things from a person`s view. You watch people and cars doing all their stuff and there`s an amazing amount of variety which increase with each new building. It`s actually quite impressive once the city gets really populated. However, I think there should be a dedicated 1st person view where you can just walk about (WASD keys or custom) and look around as the graphics are easily good enough for it. Perhaps in an add-on, guys?

The graphics of Disasters are nicely done, but a little underwhelming for me. Sure tornadoes do mess things up a bit, with people and cars flying into the air, but I expected more from the volcanoe as it just spews hot molten lava rocks on your city... Ok that`s pretty cool, but i was expecting laval flows... I guess that might`ve ruined everything though, as you can`t build on lava. Earthquakes aren`t dramatic enough either. Clean up effects of fires and oil slicks are nice with helos flying around spraying water and stuff.

The game will keep you involved and the extra stuff does add extra life to the game, however, it`s not quite the major step up you`d expect from a whole new version 4- I hoped for quite a lot more really with more immersion for your Avatar.

DRM? Interesting it is. I installed completely offline and it ran fine. All that was required was a code. No steam (HOORAH! Thankyou Tropico 4 makers).
However, install the game or try playing while connected to the net and it will require you to make an account first and all that- I have no idea why as I saw no benefit. So I advise, install offline (disconnect from net! Kiddies) if you don`t need all that shenanigans.

4 Stars for not being quite as great or improved as I`d hoped, but still a very entertaining game!

Another solid improvement in the Tropico series. Not the revolution that tropico 3 was over tropico 2 but an improvement none the less.

A game for those who enjoy management sims. As El Presidente the island is your oyster. Create jobs, build an economy, feed your people, raise an army, maintain diplomatic relations and attract those tourists.

These games have great longevity and I come back to them time and time again. It runs beautifully on most PCs but will really shine if you've got a good chunk of RAM and a beefy graphics card to let those visuals come alive.

One of my all time favourites, hope the series keeps going from strength to strength.