Who knew that being a dictator was so hilarious?

I enjoy games with consistent character and clever humor. After all, anyone can write a line or two of funny dialog, but few can paint a world so rich with wit and imagination that it never breaks character. Tropico is a series that has shown that just such a world can blend seamlessly with a very unlikely bedfellow — that of the deep world-building strategy genre.

I am happy to say that Tropico 4, the series’ latest installment, continues this tradition. From the beginning, the game makes it’s intentions clear. The typical “Press A to start” message is replaced with a more appropriate “Press any button to rule!” while a sunny, tropical melody with Latin undertones plays in the background. It’s a line of text designed so that the game can detect which controller the player is using, but is only a small example of the developer’s attention to detail and strong desire to always stay in character.

My only other experience with Tropico was playing the Tropico 3 demo last year, so I started with the game’s tutorial option. Given how deep the game gets as you are faced with micromanagement that sometimes narrows down even to individual citizens, this turned out to be an absolute necessity for me.

After surviving the longer-than-expected tutorial (I believe it took me about 2 hours to complete), I launched into the game’s campaign mode. The campaign spans 20 “missions” over ten distinct island locations and provides a narrative for your rise to glory. Missions themselves are merely required objectives (as opposed to the various optional objectives you’re presented with), each of which forces you to focus on a different aspect of the game’s inner systems.

Each mission can easily take over an hour to complete, so don’t expect to blow through the campaign in a single sitting. At least, not in a single “normal person” sitting.

At the start of each mission, you chose your dictator. There’s a set list well known dictators to chose from, or you can create your own. Avatar customization is a bit limited, but whatever you chose will be visible on your in-game character. You also select a “back story” which impacts how various factions feel about you from the onset, as well as a set of three traits that also impact various in-game attributes. All of these felt minor and trivial, but it’s nice to have at least a little in the way of customization.

The sandbox mode makes up the other main gameplay scenario, and is exactly what you’d expect it to be. This mode gives you ample opportunity to define a particular game’s setting, starting conditions, etc, and then sets you loose to rule on your own.

The crux of the gameplay itself relies on two factors; maintaining steady income in order to continue growth, and maintaining the support of the people. So far, I’m in love with the amount of freedom you have to accomplish these goals. Money can be generated from your island’s natural resources. Early on, this will be the best way to build up your economy.

From there, you have the option to exploit further industrialization to increase revenue from exports, you can focus on tourism and bringing in the oversea dollar through attractions, or you can manage your citizens to maximize revenue through taxes and fees. In the later-game, it’s important to be able to do all these things, but it’s always up to you to balance them in a way that reflects your ruler’s style.

A ruler is nothing if there’s nobody to rule. Tropico’s population will give you plenty to keep busy with. The various in-game factions each have their own wants, needs, and agendas, and they aren’t shy about making these things known. Each faction has a leader who is an actual in-game citizen. These leaders can be bribed, arrested, “disposed of”, etc.

Or, if you’re a more gentle and caring leader, you can simply address the factions’ concerns to keep the leaders happy. When interacting with the factions, each is represented by a distinct character. These characters do an amazing job of embodying each side and setting them apart from one another. For instance, the extremely “hippy-dippy” Ms Flowers represents the environmentalists. She probably irks me the most of all, because hippy-dippy people tend to irk me in real life.

The striking sexual undertones of the head of Education, Ms Pineapple, often caught me off guard. Your right-hand man, General Penultimo, was quick to offer helpful tips and support, even if his morals were questionable.

These details shine through every aspect of the game’s presentation. It’s the little things, like the way your military adviser pops up to advise you that the island is “under attack by a rebellious tornado.” Radio-broadcast style sound bytes trigger after certain events. My favorite so far is the line that comes after completing construction of a modern art museum:

“People of Tropico! You will love modern art like your life depends on it! Unless it becomes main-stream. Then you will hate it and consider it pedestrian. Now go contemplate quietly in the corner.”

All the polish and shine of the presentation is for naught if the game itself doesn’t play well. Unfortunately, Tropico 4 was more of a mixed bag for me here. The level of detail is astounding — while I know it’s not the only game that does it, I’m not used to my constructed cities actually having citizens that live their lives in the worlds I’m creating. You can literally select a person that’s walking down the street and see where they live, where they work, what their political alignment is, what their needs and wants are, etc etc.

In order to have a place to live, a person or family must be able to afford the rent. Staffing jobs is a matter of having an available, qualified citizen (which requires schools, which requires teachers, etc etc) and requires the job to be attractive enough for people to want to work there. Raising wages or fees is all a part of the overall balancing act of your economy. As you can imagine, it’s a lot to take in.

On top of this, you must carefully decide what order to build the game’s various buildings in order to meet both the needs of your citizens and the wants of the factions. Ignoring citizens leads to sickness, death, starvation, rebellion, and crime. As overall happiness declines, you run the risk of losing an election or being overthrown by a coup.

Everything you do has an impact on everything else; things cost money, money requires things, everything requires people, people require other things. It’s a ton to manage — who would have thought running a country would actually be complicated? In and of itself, this level of detail isn’t a bad thing. I like games like Civilization, so having a game demand so much management is a welcome challenge.

The problem lies in the accessibility and visualization of these complex dependencies. Tropico 4 uses the same almanac system I remember from the prior game. This gives access to many graphs and charts that follow . . . well, just about anything you could wish to see. Unfortunately, I often had a much more difficult time determining simple things, like if my farms were producing enough food for all my citizens, or how much product a lumber mill or mine was outputting.

The control was better than I expected — I’ve always felt that the PC keyboard/mouse combo was all but a necessity for these types of games. Tropico doesn’t really require a ton of fast-and-precise cursor movement, so the joysticks are a non-issue. Building roads was often annoying, as they tend to twist and turn in all sorts of odd directions as you select the starting and ending point for them.

While you can rotate buildings in 8-degrees of orientation, they don’t always line up with the roads or other buildings. This doesn’t really present any problems, per se, but it bugged my obsessive-compulsive desire for straight, orderly city blocks.

Challenges get a bit repetitive and largely boil down to following “do this” “do that” check lists. Still, the depth of the game looks to offer plenty of entertainment and replayablility, particularly in the sandbox mode. I can see my desire to build a stronger rule as something that will keep me coming back; and the fact that just-and-fair and cold militarist-dictator are both valid strategies means I can play the game differently depending on my mood.

Graphically, the game looks colorful and alive. It’s not a huge improvement over it’s predecessor, but it’s a joy to look at. While the camera can be rotated, zoomed, and tilted up or down, I wish it could provide a more straight-down view for managing construction. The level of detail is amazing — from following individual people to zooming in to see the actual animals populating the local zoo. Everything has a consistent, slightly cartoony feel.

In all, Tropico 4 is a quality strategy game that spares no opportunity to hit you over the head with it’s over-the-top characters. It’s deep and addicting, but the limited scope and island size might be a turn off to some fans of other city-building and civilization based titles. For those looking for something a bit different, the game is a can’t-miss.

One Response to “Review – Tropico 4 (360)”

1. More Great Reviews for Tropico 4! « Kalypso Media says:

   October 24, 2011 at 9:50 am

   [...] score – 8 out of 10 http://njoystic.com/2011/10/19/review-tropico-4-360/ “Tropico 4 is a quality strategy game that spares no opportunity to hit you over the head [...]

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