by Gravehound

Formats
PC and Xbox 360
Release date
September … no, October 7th, no wait … the 13th, thats the one.
(which means its out now)

Tropico 3 places you in the shoes of a Cold War era dictator, putting you in control of various Caribbean style islands and leaves you to decide how to build up these island states and run them. The game is a typical City Management sim with a grass roots approach to running a town and a huge emphasis on politics. Will you be a man of the people, a political genius or a vicious tyrant? Will you be a communist, capitalist or a mixture of the two? All these choices, plus many more are put at your feet in this very unique strategy game.

What the game gives you

The game has a 15 level campaign, a sandbox mode allowing you to play any of the campaign islands or a randomly generated island and a challenge mode that allows you to create your own islands in much more detail that you can upload and share.
The Campaign mode put you into various scenarios on different islands with their own objectives. These vary from exporting a certain amount of goods, earning a certain amount of money to merely staying in a position of power until the end of the game whilst reaching certain targets.

The sandbox mode, lets you play an island until either the end of your term or until you lose your seat in power. You get given a choice of either one of the campaign islands or you can have an island randomly generated to your specifications. You can also choose other parameters for the game such as how quick your populace are to take up arms, how far from the US the island is and how often random events happen.

The game has also added an avatar system, where you can choose to play as one of the games pre-set dictators (Including real ones such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara) or create your own custom one. Each avatar’s looks can be customised and then given different traits that effect various aspects of their leadership. Their backgrounds, good and bad traits and the way they came to power effect how the different factions feel about your dictator, how much buildings cost, how profitable some industries are and whether you gain free buildings from the start of the level.

The gameplay

This plays on the surface much like any other City Management Sim. You lay down buildings, roads and various other structures in order to make a working town that makes you money allowing you to continue the process until the end of the level.

Tropico 3 however relies heavily on immigration to expand your town. Over time, trade ships stop at your island bringing immigrants and exporting goods, but people will only come to your island if you are providing the services people want. Good housing and jobs are essential for gaining new people, as is good healthcare and entertainment, and if you don’t keep your industries full of workers you’ll never earn any money to keep your town expanding and you bank balance in the black.

Getting into debt early on in a level is actually pretty commonplace, but luckily the superpowers (Depending on how much they like you) will send you yearly aid packages to help you along, and the world bank allows you to keep spending into $10,000 worth of debt, which can actually make the world of difference when trying to expand your economy.

When constructing buildings, you lay down the foundations after which you must wait for your builders to begin their shifts and start building. This can be a lengthy process especially if your construction office is understaffed but does add a more realistic approach as opposed to buildings appearing instantly. The same problem can be applied to the teamsters (the guys who move your exports from where they’re made to the docks to be exported) with them apparently on vacation for the most of the first half hour of a level, thus almost always putting you into debt.

As you play the game, various scenarios are put to you to deal with which can effect various aspects of the game either instantly or over time. These include business deals, political turmoil, shady dealings, assassination attempts and anything else they could think of throwing at you. The results of these scenarios vary from gaining or losing money, political standings, buildings and civilians.

Your choices for expanding your towns and economies vary greatly from level to level. Some are agricultural havens, others industrial powerhouses and the rest tourist paradises, but all are fairly simple on the surface to get to grips with.
Unfortunately for you however not everybody likes change, or at least the changes you try to bring about, and so eventually somebody’s going to step up and try to stop you. Don’t keep your demanding populace happy and you’ll quickly find people rebelling against your regime. In order to combat this consistent problem, you’ll need to build up your army to keep them at bay or fight them when they attack. However this in itself can force people into rebellion for a larger army means even less liberty for your people.

The biggest annoyance with the basic gameplay as stated is the lacklustre approach to work by some of the builders and teamsters, with it sometimes taking a good five to ten minutes for any of them to get on with any work. The other downside is with some of the structure placement, with it not being obvious as to why a building will not go down in an area.

The Politics

Tropico 3 handles politics far better then any other strategy game I’ve ever played. For a start it has a very ground level approach to politics with you having to cater to the needs of the individual people rather then just yourself. It being the Cold War, military coups, uprisings, assassinations and invasions are commonplace, and so keeping yourself on the good sides of the masses is vital to staying in power.

The games populace (known as Tropicans) all have their own political inclinations, some are communists, others capitalists, some are religious, and others intellectuals with other such groups to boot. All these groups have their own personal agendas for the island, as well as their own opinions on your leadership. Failure to provide these people with what they want, and you’ll find the rebel populace on the rise, or your own army beating down your door.

Luckily the game gives you an almanac full of information about each political group and what they want, and loads of personal information for each and every Tropican on the island, allowing you to quickly and easily see what they want from you as a leader.
With this information you can decide what route you want to take with your island, what structures to build and what edicts to activate. The edicts are essentially the policies you can activate to effect your populace on a wider scale. Edicts can effect the views of the whole populace, single groups, the foreign superpowers or the islands different industries. For example, you can activate the literacy programme once you’ve built a high school so that students and workers learn skills at a quicker rate, or the Mardi Gras edict to increase your tourism rating and attract more wealthier tourists, and the Military Modernisation edict to improve the housing and healthcare of soldiers, as well as their skill in battle.

The great thing about the politics is that its in no way a one sided affair, there’s just as many shady actions available to you as there are good ones. From giving bribes, to forming secret polices, wire-tapping and assassinations there’s plenty of ways to play the corrupt tyrant.

Being the leader of what is supposedly a democracy there are elections held every 4 or 5 years, which means you’ll have to work hard between elections to get people to like you in order to stay in power. The elections allow you to give speeches to your people where you can raise issues, praise and promise things to your people in order to gain their votes, as well as abusing edicts and fixing the polls in order to secure your presidency.

The best thing about the way politics effects the gameplay is that there’s only a couple of actions in the game that are universally liked by the people, with everything else managing to piss someone off. This makes it very difficult to try and do everything at once forcing you to take risks and make concessions in order to advance.

Presentation and Controls

Tropico, although being a hugely detailed game with loads of depth, hasn’t taken the usual bland approach to its presentation like many of its counterparts (SimCity being an obvious one), it has instead adopted an almost tongue in cheek look at the Cold War era and all the events surrounding it.

From the start of every level you’re introduced to your resident local radio DJ Juanito who will comment on various events that take place on the island as well as actual events that happened at the time (JFK assassination/Cuban missile crisis etc.). His approach to news reading is both entertaining and light hearted but also probably very reminiscent of the government controlled radios of the time. The messages you receive throughout the game in the scenarios are usually over the top and very unbelievable situations. Being blackmailed by witchdoctors and being struck with Llama flu pandemics is hardly your typical Cold War era crisis.

Visually the games stunning. All the pre made islands in the game are gorgeous and brilliantly crafted full of beautiful little touches you wouldn’t notice unless you looked for them. The detail in the level design is on par with that of Company of Heroes, in that the game is just as detailed from a distance as when you zoom right down to ground level. In this case its probably far more detailed the closer you get to the ground.
One thing that is a shame on the visual front is the lack of event specific animations in the game. There are so many edicts that could’ve had animations attached to them in one way or another that weren’t which just screams wasted potential.

The music in the game is also brilliant. A wonderful mix of exotic, vibrant tunes that make you want to bounce around and have a bit of a dance. The only problem with the games soundtrack is that its only around a half hour long and as such, repeats itself a lot due to the length of the levels.

The interface the game uses is very simple, with all the essential information on money, populace, happiness etc. all being focused around the mini map in the bottom left of the screen. There you also have your time control options which are essential seeing as some of the maps last for over 30 years in game which is bloody long even at the fastest speed.

The controls for the game are about as easy as you’re going to find. All of your actions are executed via the mouse and the camera with the d-pad. The right mouse button accesses the building options, and the short cuts on the bottom left of the screen provide access to the almanac, edicts and other statistics pages.

The Conclusion

If you’ve ever been a fan of any City Management Sim then you have to play this game as it is by far the best game of its kind I’ve played. Barely any of the other games of the genre get both the city building and the politics right and this is the only game I’ve played that does both excellently.

If you’ve never played a game like this or never got into one before, then there’s nothing wrong with having a crack at this game. Seeing as there’s demo’s on both the Xbox 360 and PC (via steam, impulse or directly from the Tropico 3 website), there’s no shortage of ways to get a hold of it. Plus the demo gives you the first 2 levels of the game which are about 2 hour apiece.

Tropico 3 has an excellent blend of city management and politics, with a wonderful sense of humour and enough content to last you a good 30+ hours.

Thumbs up.